


The Rack, the Chain, the Wheel

by Tayine



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Captivity, F/F, F/M, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Multi, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Other Immortals, POV Multiple, Protective Team, Quynh is unapologetically the villain, Sequel, Torture, Whump, or is she
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-24
Updated: 2020-11-30
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:35:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 27,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27183226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tayine/pseuds/Tayine
Summary: By the nights pass’d in sleepless care,The days of endless woe;All that you taught my heart to bear,All that yourself will know.Quỳnh finds Booker first. The rest fall into her grasp so easily, it's almost unsporting. But she'll take her revenge however it presents itself, because her only thought now is to hurt those she loved, those she lost, as much as they once let her be hurt.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko, Booker | Sebastien le Livre/Nile Freeman, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 33
Kudos: 115





	1. Chapter 1

An hour may destroy what an age was building.

\--old English proverb

There was no question that he was trapped. She wore her confidence like an oil slick, the resting knowledge that she had already won wrapped tight like her crimson peacoat. But beneath it, perceptible even though he was sure she was trying to hide it, he could see the rawness of her hate, the iron-sharpened claws she would strike with if he made the wrong move. It was this he feared, and the ten feet between them wouldn’t be enough if he tried to turn and run.

She waited in the silence that he let hang, the air thick like in an overheated sauna, before gesturing at the small kitchen table situated in their middle-ground. “Have a seat,” she said, owning the place that had once, sometime in the past, been his and was his no longer.

There was no room to refuse, either. Booker’s hands ached on the gun that he wasn’t sure he would be able to shoot straight, even with the inebriation evaporating from his blood, creating hollows under his skin where alcohol had long dug its trenches. He swallowed, lowering the gun just a bit, just so she could see that he was listening, that she wouldn’t have to repeat herself. The danger behind her eyes was reptilian. He remembered the first time he had ever looked into Andy’s eyes; where then there had been the deepest wells of age and wisdom and expertise, here there was all that and more. Andy would kill; she had never tortured.

Quỳnh moved away from the counter where she had been leaning, frightening Booker into a flinch that she saw and smiled at. “Come sit, Booker,” she said, stepping to the table and taking a seat first.

He followed, laying the gun on the messy table, the muzzle facing her. He pulled the chair and settled into it so that only his left elbow rested on the surface, his feet, unconscious or not, facing the door.

“Are you afraid?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said, because she would want him to be, and because he was.

“Don’t be, lamb,” she said, reaching for and touching his cheek. He half-expected the accompanying pain of fingernails biting into the skin, and he didn’t much like the endearment that sounded innocent, sacrificial.

“Why are you here?”

“I had to make the dreams stop,” she said, puzzled.

“Why not go to them first?”

She cocked her head, watching him. “I don’t dream of them.”

Booker restrained himself from saying Nile’s name. It was possible she didn’t know it. It was almost certain she didn’t know of Andy’s mortality. It was less debatable whether she knew of his actions, of his banishment. They were a family, a crew, but they didn’t spend every day, month, or even year together. It was not unusual that she had found him alone. If the others had split up – though he thought this was unlikely, given Nile’s newness – she would have no way of tracking the three that had been hers, back then. There was a reason she had come to him, rather than tracking the newborn.

Quỳnh smiled at his taciturnity. “You’re not what I pictured, you know,” she said conversationally, leaning back in her chair and taking another sip of the cool, clear water she had poured for herself. Looking at it reminded Booker of the two-century burn of salt at the back of his throat, the regular waking from sleep gasping at air that wouldn’t come until the tears dried from his eyelids. Joe and Nicky had reassured him, during one of their very first conversations, that he wouldn’t have to endure it every night. There was no schedule for it, no regularity, so sometimes, he would have a peaceful night’s rest.

‘But it will still happen?’ he had asked, heartbroken at coming so close. When they’d first come together and explained the rules of this strange new life, he had rejoiced. The nightmares of drowning had come the same as the other dreams, of the faces he learned over the course of several bitterly cold, unhappy months in Russia and then Poland, and, for a brief moment, he had been glad to know there would be no more. But that outlook had shattered when they explained who Quỳnh was, what she had been, what she was now.

‘Yes,’ they had said gently, taking his hands. ‘We don’t know how to stop the dreams. You’ll have to… live with them.’

And so he’d lived with them, coughing at the lack of air as his lungs seemed to dry up in his sleep, tasting seawater as it poured up and down his throat, scraping its burn into his nose and along his tongue. Over the centuries, it had gotten easier – he remembered faster after waking, knew to keep a canteen or flask close at hand to gulp away the taste. And eventually, miraculously, he had seemed to dream of her less, or not remember it if he had done so. When Nile had awoken that first night, describing her experience, he had retreated from it, barely listening as Nicky and Joe told the story, just as they had done for him. He regretted that Nile would have to endure it as he had, but there had been no way to help her.

Until Quỳnh appeared in his apartment, dry and fresh-faced and coiling with the hate and rage Nile and Booker had barely gotten a taste of beneath the salt and weight of the ocean.

“They will want to see you,” he murmured, ignoring what she’d said. He wanted nothing less than to talk about himself, or to know what she saw of him. He could barely stand to look at himself in a mirror these days; he couldn’t even imagine what would be reflected back at him through her eyes.

“All in due time.”

“Andy—”

She struck him, her fingernails raking across his cheek. He clapped a hand to the injury, stunned first at her speed and then at her demeanor, which had remained as it was, fixed and unchanging. Not even a hair had been misplaced.

After a long, tense moment of staring at each other, while the scrapes on his cheek healed beneath his palm, she moved again, turning her head as if survey the lay of his apartment. “Don’t say her name.”

“Okay.”

“You don’t know her,” she said. “Not like I do.”

“Of course.”

“You don’t have much, do you?” she asked, firing this almost as soon as he had finished his latest.

“What do you mean?”

She gestured up and down his torso, her expression going derisive. “This. You. So very unsubstantial for such a big man.”

It was true, and if he’d had more within him, he would have been offended by this. As it was, he shrugged, taking a long breath through his nose and looking at nothing somewhere over her shoulder. No, he didn’t have much. That was the problem, had also been the solution.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

He laughed, full-bodied scorn coming out where before there had been, well, nothing.

“What are you laughing at?”

“No, Quỳnh, I do not want to talk about it,” he said, shaking his head and still chuckling.

“I’m a good listener.” Her eyes were wide, projecting the innocence he didn’t believe she had carried for two thousand years.

“I’m sure you are,” he said, aware he was approaching the fallout zone, speeding towards the signs that screamed ‘Danger! Do Not Approach!’ “I appreciate the offer, but I don’t feel like talking about myself right now.”

“What _do_ you want to talk about?”

“Honestly?”

“I expect nothing less.”

“I want to hear about you.”

He didn’t, not really, but there was a reason she had come here today, letting herself into his apartment just to prove she could, slapping him at the mere mention of Andy’s name. He didn’t have much, but he hadn’t fully lost his curiosity. Or his fear. Something about the gleam in her eyes told him she wanted to talk. Whether it be a monologue or a speech or a manifesto, she had things to say, and he would open up the floor to her. If attention was what she needed, he would give it. Partially, he knew he was self-flagellating, opening himself up to the unhealthiness of her psyche because he deserved even worse than whatever injury her half-millennium madness would inflict. He remembered Nile’s suffering just from momentarily brushing up against it, and he knew that if Quỳnh had plans that involved him, he would endure them. If he had to swelter and crack and peel under the heat of her rage, he would, because he deserved nothing less.

“All in due time,” she murmured again, after another long beat of watching him from across the small table.

“How did you escape?”

She shook her head. “No more questions.”

“I thought—”

She stood suddenly, coming around the small table to tower over him where he sat. Her hand was placed now over his windpipe, the fingers curled in around the delicate hyoid bone, and as he looked up at her, a gust of cold resignation blew through him.

“I thought you’d be different,” she said, staring into his eyes.

He swallowed, feeling the buck of his Adam’s apple against her palm. “So did I,” he whispered. What she had been. What she was now.

She crushed his throat with a squeeze and sat back in her chair, waiting for the long, painful death to take him.

Nile wandered into the kitchen of the condo, pulling the tension out of her arms with a gymnast’s stretch above her head. Andy was scrolling through something on her phone, sitting at the kitchen island with a mug of coffee teetering close to her lips. Nicky had his back to them, whisking a bowl of eggs above a hot skillet.

“Sleep well?” Andy asked, not looking up from the screen.

“Okay.”

“Want some coffee, Nile?” Nicky asked.

“I’ll make some tea.” She went around the island, busying over the electric kettle, pulling a box of teabags from the cupboard. They were in Germany and had been occupying this, one of the group’s many bases, for three days. Nile had learned fairly quickly that the ins and outs of their travels and operations looked strangely similar to the movements of a family taking on a summer vacation home; always, after unlocking the front door and dumping their luggage in the front hall, the first order of business was to unpack the bags of groceries they had bought on their way in, reacquainting themselves with the kitchen utensils and drawers. Andy had shown her an offline digital map they maintained, pinpricked with dots that indicated every one of the safehouses and properties they kept for themselves. After centuries of real estate and war and industrialization, her new family had surprised her by being a group of land barons, owning or knowing of properties that were theirs in almost every country in the northern hemisphere. Some of them, she had learned, were listed as Airbnbs, earning passive income as long as they weren’t doing work within a thousand-mile radius, and were kept well-maintained in between lettings. She’d been pleased with the bedroom that was hers; it was bright, airy, with the window looking out into the forested green of a small village just outside Frankfurt.

Nicky stirred at the eggs, piles of chopped vegetables arranged neatly on the cutting board in front of him. A frittata, she could see, her stomach gnawing painfully. The thought of food and drink sickened her for a moment, and she paused as she reached to flip the lever of the kettle down to start its boil.

“You all right?” Nicky murmured, turning his chin just a bit to her.

“Mm-hmm.” Her hand curled into a fist, still aloft just above the countertop, then she moved it to him, gripping his wrist with her fingers. He stilled for the briefest of moments before nodding silently, an acknowledgement, and leaned to his right over to the fridge, opening it. Over his shoulder, she watched him root around, pushing the small cardboard box of mushrooms behind the orange juice.

“ _Cavolo_ ,” he muttered.

“What?” Andy asked.

“I think we ran out of mushrooms.”

She heaved a long-suffering sigh, hauling up from the island stool. “I’ll go get some.”

“ _Grazie_ , boss. Can you also get blackberries for smoothies tomorrow?”

“Sure thing.” She was already halfway out the front door, shrugging into a jacket.

For a beat or two after the door closed, the two of them stood in silent anticipation, waiting to see if she would return for forgotten car keys or wallet. When nothing happened, he turned to her, opening up his body language.

“What is it?”

“I dreamt of Quỳnh again,” she began, and she hated that she saw a flash of dismay in his pale eyes, that she would have to bring the pain of this back into his heart.

“Wait. Come on.” He turned off the burner beneath the skillet and led her down the hall to the ground floor bedroom. As he opened the door, going inside without even a knock, he said, “Joe.”

“Mm.” Joe was spread-eagled on his belly on their bed, his head nestled beneath the pillow rather than on top of it. He came out from underneath, blinking, seeing Nile close behind Nicky as they came in. Nicky sat on the side of the bed and beckoned Nile to join, patting the mattress.

She did, and Joe saw her sadness, because he pushed up with his arms, settling back on bent legs, tangled in the top sheet.

“What is it?” he asked, looking between them.

“I had another dream about Quỳnh.”

Joe’s gaze flickered to the open door of their bedroom.

“She’s gone,” Nicky said. Since France, since that first night, they had all worked together under this unspoken rule: no matter how much Nile suffered, no matter what she saw, she wouldn’t mention Quỳnh again in front of Andy.

“Go on.”

“I think she’s out of the water.”

The two of them were too old, too practiced, to let their reactions show on their faces, even kind Joe who wore his heart on his sleeve. Still, though, Nile could barely look them in the eyes, because she recognized their controlled breathing and tense hands for what they were: fear, anticipation, regret, heartbreak, hope.

“What did you see?” Nicky asked softly, breaking the spell.

“A street. European, from the architecture, but no idea where.” Nile looked down at her lap, then braved herself into the next sentence, seeking forgiveness in their gazes: “She’s so angry.”

“At us?” Joe asked, a breath.

“I can’t tell. I don’t get thoughts, just feelings. Just flashes of it. I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right, Nile,” Nicky said, putting one of his hands over hers, even as he turned to look at his husband over his shoulder. “This one we need to tell.”

The few times Nile had needed support through the worst of the nightmares, she had done as they were doing now, working in quiet, private conference, Joe and Nicky offering gentle assistance. They had done the same with Booker over the years, they’d said, until he’d stopped coming to them. The nightmares had never changed, they said also. Always they were of the water and her hate.

“We can’t.”

“Joe—”

“If she’s out, and the only thing Nile is feeling is her anger, then that’s the only thing driving her, and she’s not the same as she was before. She’s not our Quỳnh.”

“She’s one of us.”

“She was.”

Nicky turned back, closing his eyes. Nile looked back and forth between them, almost nauseous with the guilt that she had brought this to them.

“Nicky, I miss her just as much as you do. I wish we had saved her. But if she’s changed, if she really is being driven by this hate, the same way Booker was driven by his grief…”

“It’s not the same,” Nicky said angrily, eyes still closed.

“Yes it is. They let themselves be consumed—”

“We didn’t help them.”

Nile closed her eyes too. She wanted to interject, but it wasn’t her place. Not because she was young, or she wasn’t yet a part of the team, but she couldn’t speak to what she didn’t know, and she had harbored very, very dark thoughts, while alone, that… maybe it _was_ their fault, with Booker. Not totally, not even a majority, because Booker was a grown man and had his own agency that had led him to his own downfall. But she could see why Nicky felt this way, why Andy had said her part in the lab. While Joe and Nicky had been in love, Booker and Andy had been in grief, and the two sides of the coin that made up the team had flashed back and forth as it spun. Andy had lived enough life to move on past Quỳnh, or at least put enough distance that she hadn’t allowed her head to submerge fully into the mire, but Booker had _only_ known grief. If Andy had shown him her pain, to tell him it was okay to feel it, maybe she had forgotten to show him how to heal.

“Nile.”

She opened her eyes. They had continued to argue, but she’d missed it, blocking out the sound like she had when sitting in her bedroom with the blanket over her head as her parents fought downstairs. Joe was looking at her, his eyebrows swooped up in an expression of pleading and anguish.

“Can you remember anything else at all?”

“No,” she said, sorrowful. “I tried as hard as I could to hold onto it as soon as I woke up, but… you know.”

“We remember what it’s like.” Nicky had his chin low against his chest as he sighed. “Andy was always the one who was best at following.”

“Will you tell us if you see more?”

“Yes, I promise.” She stood up to leave, sensing the end of her need to be part of it. The two of them didn’t look like they’d be getting up to go back to breakfast anytime soon – the argument would continue when she closed the door behind her back.

“Nile,” Joe said again, stopping her before she could move away. He slid across the bed, sitting on the edge beside Nicky, holding a hand out to her, which she gave, feeling the dry warmth of his palm. “You’ll tell us if you ever… We want to do right by you.”

“I know,” she said, her throat suddenly tight. How was it possible that she already loved these men like the closest family, like the tightest bonds of friendship and trust she had ever known?

“Okay. As long as you know.”

She nodded, her lips tight against her teeth. She let go of him and left, closing the door behind her. Sure enough, as the latch slipped home, she heard their voices begin again.

Exhausted, already ready for a nap, she went to the white couch in the open plan of the living room, smelling the oily heat of the skillet that had nothing to cook. She slipped her cell phone out of her pocket and thumbed open the contacts. Nicky had given her all their permanent numbers, reciting them as she dutifully pressed the sequences, giving each contact name a first initial and an emoji. Not necessarily because of operational security, because she was fairly sure their phones were some of the most secure on Earth now that they had an ex-CIA officer who had tied their family phone plan into a secret, privately-operated service network, but because she had done that when she was younger for her favorite people. It had always amused her to pick out the single best emoji for a person, a kind of name-face-concept-word association that boiled a person down to one cute little picture.

She thumbed the contact that had a B and a Vespa emoji, hesitating, before opening a new chat log. Nicky had given her the number last, something kindling behind his eyes, and she had never used it. It was highly unlikely the number would be the same in a hundred years, but it was good to have, just in case.

She typed out the message and waited. Booker had read receipts on; he had seen the message almost instantly, as if he’d been using the phone when the text came through.

 _Hey_ , she sent.

_Hi. Is this who I think it is?_

She smiled sadly and sent over an emoji of a female face, holding it so that she changed the skin color to match hers.

_I’m not sure I should be responding…_

_Fuck that. I need to talk to you._

_Is everything all right?_

Nile chewed her bottom lip. _No. Where are you?_

_Where are you? I can leave now._

_No, I’m going to come to you. We’re in Germany. I can take the train, if you’re in Europe._

_Paris_ , he typed, giving the address of a very French street name.

She copied it into Google maps, pinning a star on the map once it had zoomed in. She was already bringing up a train ticket search when Nicky and Joe came down the hall, returning to the order of business. They smiled at her where she was curled on the couch.

“Breakfast?” Nicky said, offering it gently, like he understood if her stomach would be upset.

“I’m going to go out for the day,” she said, not sure why she was lying by omission, knowing she would tell the truth if they asked. It would bring up a fight, and possibly make her miss her train, but they wouldn’t change her mind.

They didn’t ask. Joe looked up from the kettle, where he’d commandeered her abandoned tea. “Do you want one of us to go with you?”

“No, it’s okay. I’ll be back late.” Really late, depending on how long this talk with Booker took. At a four hour journey one way, it looked like it was going to be a long day.

“Okay. Call us if you need anything.”

She went upstairs to her bedroom, changing from the loungewear she’d been preparing to spend the day in into a pair of comfortable jeans and flat-soled ankle booties, good for walking uneven streets. She threw together a kit, slipping the Spanish passport Copley had given her into the front pocket of a small backpack, taking the worn paperback novel she’d been working on from her bedside table.

Back downstairs, she took a bottle of water and an apple from the fridge, closing the zipper of the pack. Nicky had poured the eggs and veggies into the skillet, finally on his way to finishing breakfast, and Joe had taken up Andy’s stool, sipping his mug of tea.

At the front door, putting on her own jacket, she turned back to the two of them. “Hey.”

They both looked over.

Nile took a breath. “I love you guys.”

Nicky’s shoulders sagged; Joe set his mug down. “We love you too, Nile.”

It was the first time they’d said it. It was the first time Nile had said it to anyone since her last phone call to her mother, nearly two years ago. She’d written it in letters, but the spoken words had a power that seemed to bubble inside of her like magic.

“Tell Andy—”

“Tell Andy what?”

Nile stepped backwards out of the doorway as Andy came up the short front walk, a paper grocery bag clutched in one arm. “I’m going out for the day,” she said, opening the door wider for her. “I’ll be back late.”

“Do you want company?”

Nile sighed, smiling, shaking her head. This stupid family. “No, thank you. Don’t wait up.”

“Be safe, then,” Andy said, searching her face. She alone knew nothing of the true reason for Nile’s sudden flight; Joe and Nicky thought they did, but didn’t.

“Course.”

She closed the door behind her, hefted the small backpack onto her shoulder, and texted Booker: _I’ll be there by 1._

His consciousness slipped back in slowly, curling around his limbs like a vapor. The slow choking of the crushed windpipe had been scary, but nothing prepared him for what he found at the end, or beginning, of this new start: as he rolled his head on a limp neck, blinking away the grogginess behind his eyes, he felt the cold touch of air on bare skin.

Bare skin everywhere. He had been stripped, everything including his socks and briefs. He was sitting in one of his own dining chairs, where it had been bolted to the floor, drilled through a wide, round metal tub that surrounded it. His ankles were zip-tied to the metal legs of the chair, the sharp plastic cutting painfully into his skin, and a nylon climbing rope encircled his chest and upper arms, dragged tight. His wrists were similarly zip-tied, held together at the small of his back.

“Quỳnh,” he said, looking for her.

“You came back slow,” she said conversationally. “I wonder if that says something about you.”

“Quỳnh—”

“Hush, I’m not finished yet.”

He strained his neck to look over his shoulder. Her voice had come from somewhere behind him, deeper into the single main room of his apartment. He couldn’t hear any clues of what she could be finishing, but he knew it was bad for him.

“Listen, I don’t know—”

“Booker, you’re going to have to stop pretending to yourself that you have any power here. Quiet down, or I’ll cut out your vocal cords.”

He believed her. He closed his mouth, clenching his hands into fists. The long tendons of his muscles strained and popped, but the zip-ties were industrial-grade, too strong to break at this angle.

Finally, she came around him back into view, standing prim just behind the tall lip of the metal tub. She had taken off her peacoat and scarf, dressed now head-to-toe in plain black, a long-sleeved shirt and fashionable, wide-legged pants.

He watched, waiting, his mouth still closed. He felt more vulnerable than he ever had before in his long life, approaching only the fear and helplessness he’d felt in the instant when he’d seen the blood of Andy’s gunshot wound pulsing gently into her cotton shirt. Sometimes, since then, he’d woken screaming from nightmares of that moment, standing behind her, his gun aimed at her head instead of her lower side. If he’d shot higher… if he’d hit a vital organ instead of fatty tissue…

He blinked, moving away from that.

“What are you thinking about?” Quỳnh asked, her expression mild.

Booker knew it would be churlish to reply, ‘Oh, I’m allowed to talk now?’, so he didn’t. He gave it a moment’s pause, as if he was weighing his answer, when in fact he was desperately seeking anything else to say. His mind had been wiped, a blank slate tablet with only chalk stains left behind. He’d been a good negotiator, once. He’d talked men off ledges, into handing him the gun, into going home to their families. The problem, as she had already pointed out, was that he had nothing anymore. The emptiness inside him had only grown, and would continue to grow, and he had nothing to offer her, nothing to negotiate.

“C’mon, you can say.”

“I don’t know what you want,” he said.

“Of course you don’t. I haven’t asked for it yet.”

He lifted his gaze, knowing she saw the bruises around his eyes that were not inflicted by injuries. “What do you want, then?”

“First I just… want to talk.” She retrieved the second of the two dining chairs, pulling it as close as the spread of the legs would go to the edge of the metal tub in which he was tied.

“Then talk.”

“Fine, Booker,” she said in an offended tone, as if she was annoyed he wasn’t engaging with her game. “What do you know about me?”

This was not what he’d been expecting. He scoffed before he could help it, and he saw the answering flash of warning in her expression. She wasn’t to be laughed at. He already knew that. “What do you mean?” he asked, stalling for time.

“What did they tell you about me?” She crossed her legs, sitting back in the chair. Her hands were empty, but he knew there were tools, or toys, behind him.

“They said you were an incredible fighter.”

She nodded without a hint of a smile or immodesty.

“They said you were kind.”

No reaction.

“They told me about Lykon, how you used to dance with him at night. How you made friends in every village you went to. How good you were with the horses.”

She closed her eyes, as if he was singing her a lullaby.

“They told stories, inconsequential ones, ones you wouldn’t think they could remember. The night Nicky was bitten by a snake. The time you helped find a missing child in Damascus.”

“He had fallen down the side of a hill into a patch of thorns,” she murmured dreamily, eyes still closed.

“They told me they loved you.”

Too far. She opened her eyes, her gaze back to the emotionless slits of a serpent. “They lied.”

“They didn’t, Quỳnh,” he sighed, his heavy head drooping. He knew what was coming as she stood, retreating back behind him. “They tried so hard.”

Two metallic prongs dug into the tender flesh of the back of his neck, and his entire body seized up as the electrical current ran down his spine and along every pathway to his fingertips. His toes curled inwards, the soles of his feet flexing, and he groaned his way into a lock-jawed scream. When the biting, stuttering click of the Taser fell off, his body sagged, trembling with residual shocks as he panted.

She gave him no time. The harsh sound started up again, and he tried to move his body away from it, but she buried the prongs into the same spot on his neck, burning its fire and lightning all the way into his nerves. He lost sight, his teeth clenching so hard he worried they would crack, and the fire-tight pain of every muscle in his body being spasmed into distress consumed him.

When she took it away again, he choked once, twice, remembering how to breathe. His head went all the way back, and she put her warm hand around the delicate skin of his chin and throat, holding him there.

“Where are they?” she asked softly.

He blinked several times, clearing the gray smudges in his vision. “I don’t know,” he whispered.

She took her hand away and shocked him where it had been, his scream echoing until he lost the air for it. There was no time, no ability, to inhale when he was locked like this, and he felt the dizziness of suffocation at the end of this third round. He coughed, his thighs aching like after a ten-mile run.

“It’s not you I’m after, Booker,” she said. She was still standing directly behind him, and her long-fingered hand drew down his trapezius. The trailing tickle of it hurt in the after-effects of the Taser, and he jerked away from her. “You are just as much a victim of them as I am.”

“You’re a victim of the superstitious idiots who threw you in,” he grunted. “Andy and Joe and—”

He’d forgotten she didn’t want to hear her name. She stabbed him in the same place she’d just been tickling, straight down with a sharp enough knife that it went in cold as hellfire before beginning to burn hot.

He rocked in the flimsy metal dining chair, roaring, but whatever she’d done to the supports drilled and bolted to the floor kept it steady. He resisted calling her the names that were so eagerly awaiting just behind his tongue, knowing they would only make him feel better for a short while.

She took out the knife, a long, slim folding knife with a polished wooden handle. “Where are they?”

“I swear, I don’t know—”

The Taser came back, held for the longest time yet, and this time he passed out, or died, not even realizing it until he was opening his eyes to look into her face. She was sitting in the chair in front of his again. Sweat trickled down an eyebrow, stinging its salt into his eye, and his bare ass and back were slick with it, unpleasantly sticky against the vinyl of the seat cushions.

She stared at him for a moment, her eyebrows high, her eyelids low, casually annoyed.

“We split up,” he wheezed. “I haven’t seen or spoken to them in years.”

She blew out an exasperated breath and pulled something from her pocket. It was his smart phone, the permanent one, the one which used only Wi-fi so that it couldn’t be tracked by a network. She moved her thumb expertly across the screen, and some dim part of his mind realized, _She’s modern_.

When she turned the phone back to him, its face staring accusingly at him, it took a moment for his vision to focus on the text. It was the last text message he had sent to Joe, six months ago, confirming the room number of the hotel in Marrakech.

“So let’s not do any more lies,” she said, pocketing the phone.

“It’s been six months.”

She pursed her lips, reaching for the Taser she’d left balanced on her knee, its presence the threat it was meant to be.

“I swear, Quỳnh, I swear. I’m not with them anymore. I have no idea—”

She shocked him, but this time it wasn’t sustained, a brief blip in his pain tolerance.

He coughed and groaned, tears squeezing out between his hot eyelids. “I swear. I swear. I don’t know.”

“Call them.”

“No.”

“Why not?” she asked, her voice trilling with pleasantness.

“Because I’m not _with_ them anymore.”

Interest sparkled in her gaze. She believed him now, and it was new, a diversion, something she could sink her claws into and chew. She adjusted her seat in the chair, leaning slightly forward. “Tell me the story. Or I’ll shock you until you shit yourself.”

Booker reached for, seized, and wielded his anger, struggling against the bonds tied around him, his bare flesh prickling with pain and vulnerability. He roared, rocking in the chair, calling her names in French and Arabic and Italian, his skin opening up beneath the zip-ties. He tracked her as she stood, getting close, and he didn’t stop yelling even as the knife went in and carved through his throat, his blood pouring in a cascade down his bare chest, and he finally realized why she’d put him in the middle of the metal tub.

Nile had never been to Paris, but Booker’s apartment was close to Gare de l'Est, and thanks to the unlimited data on Copley’s encrypted secret network, she was comfortable turning on GPS to track her movements through the streets. She tried not to look like a tourist as she walked, keeping her face neither permanently fixed on her phone nor at the sights, and she found the front door of his apartment fairly easily. She’d always had a good sense of direction.

She glanced around at the old building’s façade without seeing a buzzer, so she went in through the front door, rechecking his last text one more time. His was the first door on the ground floor, then, convenient enough.

She knocked on the aged wood, smelling the old, cold smell of plaster and stone and just a bit of alcohol. Maybe she’d convince him to show her around as they talked, getting fresh air while they decided just what the hell they were going to do. She was sure he was also seeing this change in the dreams, though if he’d guessed as to the reason for this exile-breaking visit, he hadn’t alluded to it in the texts.

After a moment of no answer on the door, she knocked again, and the door swung in a bit on its ancient hinges, quiet but slightly misaligned. She pushed it further, calling, “Booker?”

The door swung open, and she saw it in flashes: Booker bloodied and sagging in the center of the room, very obviously tied to the chair he was sitting in, naked as the day he was born. He was unconscious or unresponsive, his head hung painfully low on his chest.

Nile swept the rest of the room with her gaze. She had no gun; she hadn’t wanted to spook the others if they’d seen her take one, and smuggling it across international borders had seemed a waste of time, especially with her EU passport. “Booker?” she hissed again, quieter, taking a step inside.

He didn’t stir. She strode with three long strides inside the room, seeing every corner, every hiding spot. Maybe it had been a particularly creative home invasion. But even as she got close, she saw there was no way; the chair was situated in a metal tub that was full of old, dried blood, the iron stink of it rising to her nostrils.

Booker moaned at the first touch of her hands. He was positively medieval with blood, streaked with it like paintings of the crucifixion. He was breathing raggedly through his nose, and she put a hand to his cheek, helping to lift his heavy head.

“Booker, wake up for me. Come on.”

“N…Nile?”

She looked around, saw nothing close, retreated to the kitchen drawers, searching for a knife to cut the bonds.

“Nile… what are you…”

“Just a sec, Book.” She found one and snatched it up, coming back to see his eyes opening slowly, struggling to focus on her face.

“You have to… go.”

“Just a sec,” she repeated, severing the two zip-ties around his ankles. His feet were purple with loss of circulation, a repeated dying and reviving of the tissue that was probably agony. He groaned, his calves twitching, and she went around to the back, going for his hands.

“Nile, it’s Quỳnh,” he panted, his head flopping sideways like a newborn’s as he tried to keep her in sight. “You have to leave.”

“Takin’ you with me,” she muttered, blowing past the painful chill in her stomach that had erupted at the name.

“No, Nile, she’s still here—”

She whirled around, her back to his, waiting to see the surprise attack from the shadows. “Quỳnh?” she called, her voice deepening with the challenge. “It’s Nile! Come out, you bitch!”

“Nile—”

“Let’s get you out first.” She returned to the nylon rope around his chest, struggling with the knots that had been pulled tighter than her fingers could undo. His hands, though freed from the zip-tie, were still held behind him from the pressure of the rope, his shoulders torqued at an unpleasant angle. “How long?” she asked quietly, using the kitchen knife to saw at the rope. It would take several minutes to cut through.

“Three days.”

“Oh, Booker,” she whispered.

“Why are you here?”

“I dreamed of her,” she said, still sawing. “Out of the water. I wanted to know if you had too.”

“How did you know to come here?”

“I texted you, you sent me the address.”

Booker’s shoulders rocked as he struggled suddenly. “It wasn’t me, Nile, it was Quỳnh, she has my phone, she knows you’re here—”

A blow to the side of her skull toppled her. Whoever it was moved with the silence of a shadow. She brought the kitchen knife up, her eyes watering, but the shade was already on top of her, driving their own knife into her temple, cutting her from the world like flicking off a light switch.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title and the poem excerpt are from 'Revenge' by Letitia Elizabeth Landon.


	2. Chapter 2

“We have to tell Andy,” Nicky said, as soon as the door closed behind Nile.

“Not now.”

“Joe, she has a right to know this.”

“How do you see it going, Nicky?” Joe asked, turning to him beside him on the bed, the breathy coolness of his voice strained just a little, just enough for Nicky to know he was in conflict. “What if the worst really has come to pass, and Quỳnh hates us with that same fire with which she used to love us? You remember her temper. You remember how deeply she carried grudges. If that has turned on us, and Andy finds her—"

“Quỳnh wouldn’t kill her.”

Joe gave him a pitying look, and Nicky hated, _hated_ , that he was on this side of the argument, because as much as he tried to make himself believe it, he couldn’t.

“I trust Nile’s interpretation, my love. If she fears Quỳnh’s anger just through a dream, we should as well.”

Nicky let his head tip back, closing his eyes. He wasn’t often expressive like this, and Joe came forward, kissing the roundness of his shoulder, his fingers pulling gently at his neck. “We can’t give up on her,” Nicky said. “We could give her a chance.”

“We could,” Joe said, his voice directed onto Nicky’s shirt sleeve. “But not with Andy there. Not with Andy’s… mortality. There’s too much at stake.”

Nicky sat with him for a moment, letting him work his anxiety out in a physical way as his husband scooted closer and began to kiss directly on the skin of his neck. “Do you… did you ever think it was possible?”

“What?”

He switched to Arabic, finding better phrasing for it than English. “In all the centuries we spent with her, did you ever think to yourself that it was possible she would become our enemy?”

Joe came away, and Nicky opened his eyes, found his face again in the bright of the room. Joe looked older than thirty-three, older than nine hundred fifty-four, as he murmured, “The ones we love the most leave the deepest wounds.”

Nicky recoiled from this because he knew it to be true.

Later that afternoon, he was alone in the living room, struggling through a boring contemporary fiction novel, when his cell phone vibrated on the kitchen island. He stood, relieved for the distraction, knowing it would be Nile – no one else would text him at this number.

 _I’m staying out tonight, don’t wait up_ , her message read.

He grimaced. _Hot date?_ he typed instead, going for the teasing angle Joe would applaud.

 _Something like that._ She included a winking face emoji at the end.

_Okay. Thanks for the update. Make good choices!_

She reacted with a singular laughing-tears emoji, and Nicky sighed. None of them had exactly disapproved of Booker’s dalliances, once he had picked up enough of himself to start them sometime in the 1850s, but they were careful. Andy especially had warned him away from falling in love again. ‘You will never be able to share your whole self with them,’ she’d said. ‘Get your prick wet, but keep your heart close.’

This memory left him hot with shame now. No wonder Booker had broken. How had they managed to do so poorly without even realizing it? They’d swung so far into trying to protect and prepare him for the loneliness that they’d instead inoculated him against feeling a connection with the outside world. And it wasn’t like Nile was in danger of falling in love with whatever Tinder date or bar-top hookup she had found. If this was her coping method after finding out yet another member of their family had splintered into something sharp and dangerous, well, the only thing Nicky could do was support her through it.

He went to find Joe and Andy doing weapon maintenance on Andy’s bed and told them of Nile’s night away. Joe surprised him by making a similar expression of unease as he had, but Andy merely sighed.

“How has she been doing, do you think?” she asked.

“As well as can be expected.”

A fold appeared on one side of Andy’s mouth. “That doesn’t tell me anything, Nicky.”

“She’s smart. She’s tough. It seems like she’s fitting in.”

“She’s accepted her part in this,” Joe offered. “A lot faster than Booker did.”

“I don’t need her to be compared to Booker, or you two. I just need to know she’s okay.”

Nicky and Joe exchanged a glance. “She’s okay, boss,” Nicky said. “She’ll be okay.”

Andy sighed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just don’t like knowing I won’t be around for her.”

Joe made a noise of pain in his throat. “Oh, Andy—”

“It’s true, I won’t be.”

“Just because it’s true doesn’t mean you have to think like that. You have years left with us, to be there.”

Andy fingered the spring mechanism of the pistol she’d disassembled, nodding slowly. Eventually, she began to reconstruct it without another word, and the two others looked at each other one last time before Nicky left, returning to the fiction novel. He didn’t take in a single word of it as his thoughts tossed and tumbled and worried.

He and Joe went out to the high street the next morning. They were in a tiny village suburb near the airport, and the long street of commercial buildings was comfortably pedestrian, with lots of smaller shops to browse while they strolled hand-in-hand. It was overcast, an almost-winter chill to the air, and the two of them huddled close as they walked. Eventually, Joe leaned into Nicky’s shoulder and pointed out a coffee cart that had taken residence up at the corner of the wide pedestrian street, several tall bar tables set up just outside the ordering window.

They got two very warm cups of coffee and nursed them at one of the tables, standing in companionable silence. Nicky was thinking about Nile; she hadn’t texted yet today, and he didn’t want to be scolding, but she should have known better. Maybe she was finishing off a morning romp and would slink back into the safehouse like a victorious tomcat.

“Nicky,” said Joe, and his attention went to high-alert, his sniper’s eyes roving around the groundspace of the street, cataloguing faces and shirt colors without thought. He glanced for Joe, taking in where his attention was directed, and followed it.

There was a woman who had just walked up to the ordering window of the coffee truck, and Nicky’s heart pounded as he took in her shape, colors, the feminine curve of her profile as she turned her head just enough for him to see. He conferred with Joe with a glance, who nodded, his expression a painting of disbelieving wonder. It couldn’t be…

As one, they stepped away from their table, exceedingly casual, as if they were approaching the side of the cart to reread the menu that was painted on the side panel. Nicky allowed himself the bigger glance, swooping his gaze up the woman’s face. She turned, sensing it, smiling hesitantly at his attention, as Joe, behind him, poked him once in the spine. He had come to the same conclusion as Nicky had, in the same instant, as the woman looked directly at him.

“Excuse me,” Nicky said in German. “I thought you were someone we knew.”

“Oh, it’s all right,” she laughed, clearly relieved. She wasn’t in the mood to be hit on, then.

“Have a good morning.”

“You too!” She turned back to the server behind the small window, ordering her coffee, and Joe and Nicky retreated quickly, spooked at how they had both suffered the same impossible thought.

“I could have sworn it was her,” Joe muttered in Italian, wrapping his hand around his paper cup.

“I know. The resemblance was uncanny at first.”

Joe had seen her first this time. The woman bore a shocking resemblance to the Turkish girl they had known back in their first year of immortality, back when they had barely shared a language and hadn’t even shared themselves. Her name had been Esen, and she was the first outsider to know their secret – not the last, because theirs was an infinitely cyclical story, all things considered, and scattered through the world had been a few select souls who had discovered, in one way or another, the presence of these immortals who roamed the land. Joe and Nicky had saved her from pursuers and sent her to safety on the island of Cyprus. They had always intended to find her again, just to see how her life had fared, but it hadn’t happened. Mortals’ lives were just so fleeting, in the end.

This woman was not her; her face was slightly more angular than cherubic-cheeked Esen had been, and her deeply brown eyes were flecked with more gold than he remembered in the girl’s. Nicky didn’t know why he could remember these details, but he did. He and Joe were good at remembering faces, the way Andy was good with languages and Booker was good with places.

“It’s the hair,” Joe said, stealing another furtive glance at the woman’s back as she retreated across the plaza with her coffee. “Same curls, same thickness.”

“More than the hair. Height, shape, skin color. Even her walk.”

“You remember Esen’s walk?” Joe asked, amused, taking a sip of his coffee.

“She was so confident, so cocky.” Nicky finished the last of his own drink, the cooling dregs more bitter than when it had been warm. “She stood like she owned the room.”

“I hope she was happy.” Joe put his chin in his hand for a moment, looking pensive.

“Me too.”

The air was chilling more, and Joe downed his coffee, screwing his face in a shiver at the bitter taste. “Let’s go back and start a fire.”

Nicky made an affirmative noise in his throat. “Nile still hasn’t checked in,” he added, as Joe slipped his hand into his own and they retraced their steps back along the pedestrian high street. Their safehouse was at the end of one of the more remote residential streets, a five minute walk.

“Text her.”

Nicky slipped his phone from his pocket, glad for the permission to do it. _We’re making a fire at the house. Are you coming back soon?_ he typed with one thumb, hoping it wasn’t as paternal as he was feeling. The last thing he wanted was to baby her.

He replaced the cell as they turned the corner down a smaller street, more of an alley, that was a convenient shortcut to the residential streets further out from the centralized commercial strip.

“No answer?”

“No, but I wasn’t expecting one immediately. If there’s nothing in the next hour, we could ask Copley to track her phone.”

“Can you imagine her reaction if she found out?” Joe asked, not to dissuade him, but rather as a general thought experiment.

“She should check in if she doesn’t want to be tracked,” Nicky retorted defensively.

“I’m not disagreeing, _habibi_. We have protocols for a reason.”

Nicky walked grumpily. It wasn’t like Nile to be careless. Something slithery went down his throat, and he felt a chill that had nothing to do with the air temperature. He began to turn to look at Joe, saying, “Do you think we should—what’s wrong?”

Joe had stopped, a hand to his forehead. He lowered it, looking into Nicky’s eyes. “Do you feel that?”

Nicky’s attention went into overdrive as he turned internal, taking stock. Heart rate, blood pressure, temperature, breathing. “What is it?”

“I feel…” Joe spread the fingers of his free hand, as if he was suddenly standing on the deck of a swaying ship at sea and was trying to find his balance.

Nicky felt it then, too, a sudden bath of cold instability. He took a step sideways to find the wall of the nearby shop, placing his hand flat there to anchor himself onto something unmoving, and let go of Joe’s hand to force his middle finger all the way down his throat. His stomach bucked in protest but did not release, so he tried again, his teeth scraping on his knuckles. With a tearing sound, this time he managed to trigger his gag reflex, and he vomited onto the cobblestones, the acrid burn of the acid and coffee and whatever they’d been dosed with stinging his tongue on its way up.

Joe was trying to mimic him, but whatever it had been was working fast. It was probably already in their bloodstreams. Nicky reached for him, but the tossing of the waves beneath his feet caught him, and he tripped, landing hard beside his puddle of vomit.

“Nnn,” Joe said, seeing this, blinking slow. He sank down with less violence, settling almost primly on his knees before tipping forward, trying to catch himself with a hand on the ground and missing as the world heaved around them.

Nicky felt himself being rolled onto his back, and as the overcast sky above faded, he saw the woman – _Esen? No, it hadn’t been her, had it?_ – lean into his field of vision. She said something down to him, but he had drifted too far away on the current to hear.

It was very, very cold when Joe woke. He shivered, cracking his eyes open. There was no pain from injury or rough handling, of which he was thankful. It had only been the drugging.

He was in a four-sided cell, grey-plastered walls covering three of them; the fourth was a jailhouse door, steel bars about three inches apart. He was not tied or shackled. As he rolled onto his back from the position he’d been lying in on his side, the pressure points on his hip and knee aching almost childishly, he found he had completely free movement. The ground was poured concrete, slightly textured but not rough, not tearing on the skin like the pavement outside. The lighting was supplied by a single bulb behind a dish up on the high ceilings, too high to shatter and use the glass as a weapon. There was a porcelain squat toilet in the back corner. Joe eyed the stainless steel pipes and lever just behind it. With enough force, he could snap it off for a small hand-to-hand tool. There was no other furniture or adornment in the cell, no cot for sleeping or blanket for strangling a guard through the bars. His shoes and socks, disconcertingly, were missing, but he was still dressed in the jeans and layered sweater-and-shirt he’d been wearing in town.

Across the way, Joe saw Nicky in an identical cell. He had not woken up yet. Joe shuffled up to his knees and then to standing, working the strength back into his muscles, regaining his sea-legs. The drug had destroyed his inner ear as well as caused him to lose consciousness, worse than the worst drunkenness he had felt in almost a thousand years of life.

“Nicolò,” he called gently through the bars.

“You’re up.”

Joe jerked in surprise, looking down the hall to the right. There was a small open space before a white, singular door that led out of the room that housed the cells; beside it, there was a folding chair, and the woman from the coffee cart sat calmly, a book pressed open in her lap with one hand.

He watched with feline mistrust as she dog-eared the page she was on and stood. She was dressed preppy, in a cardigan and wool slacks, but the more he looked, the more her resemblance to Esen unnerved him. He had known several doppelgängers over the years, meeting one person and then meeting a twin two hundred, four hundred years later, of a completely different background and history – that’s just how human genetics worked. But there was no way this was a coincidence. She had used her resemblance to get close to them, for an accomplice to drug their coffee while their backs were turned.

“Why are we here?” he asked.

“Interesting first question,” she grinned. Her hair was pulled back and plaited, but stray curls had fallen around to frame her face. She was about thirty-five, far older than they had ever known Esen, but he could see the same wicked sense of humor in those gold-flecked brown eyes.

“You won’t answer it?”

“Not my place. The boss’ll come in later.” She stepped down into the aisle between the cells, her hands on her hips. “Try again.”

Joe squinted, suspicious. “With what?”

“Ask more questions.”

He itched to know, despite needing to play her game to do it. “Why do you look like her?”

The woman’s conversational demeanor hitched with a twitch in the back of her jaw.

“You know who I’m talking about, don’t you?” he said, a statement rather than a question. He held two of the bars between his hands, stepping close to bring himself centered before her.

“She was my mother.”

Joe shook his head. Not just because he didn’t believe it, but because… that didn’t follow the rules.

“She told us about you two. When we were young, and we were liable to believe fairytales.” The woman looked over at Nicky, still unconscious, still curled on his side. Joe checked too, saw him breathing, saw no blood, and went back to the woman, wanting to keep her attention on him.

“She didn’t give us your real names until… well, she was always careful, and I think that’s the reason I believed it for so long. There was no reason for her to… hold back, like that, unless she sincerely believed it herself, and my mother was many things, but she was not mad. She saw the magic in the world because she had known it herself.”

Tears had begun to pool at the corners of his eyes. His gaze searched her face frantically, taking it in, even as he knew there would be no similar kindness or camaraderie in this woman as there had been in Esen. Otherwise he and Nicky wouldn’t be caged for a second fucking time in six fucking months.

“When I died, she screamed and held me. She told me Yusuf and Nicolò would come help me. They would give me answers. She promised I would be protected the way they had protected her and each other.”

“No…” Joe whispered, more of a breath than voice.

The woman’s gaze had hardened considerably. “I stayed with her for twenty more years,” she said, her voice scornful. “Unchanging, as she aged before my eyes. My sisters and brother knew, and they kept my secret, because they too thought the amazing men from _anne’s_ stories would come for me, but we had to move, because people had known I was ill, and they would see if I stayed with my mother to care for her. On the day she died, she told me to go looking for you. ‘They’re somewhere out there, _gülüm_. Find them.’”

“No,” Joe said, stronger this time. “I don’t believe you.”

Her eyebrows shot up, her eyes sparkling with passionate delight. “Seriously?” she beamed. “I tell you the fucking truth about my mother’s dying words and you call me a liar?”

“We would have dreamed about you.”

She nodded as if in understanding, her derision cooling from the firecracker burst it had been. “Oh, right. Boss told us about that.”

 _Please, god, no_ , Joe moaned in his head.

“She has a theory. I’ll let you see if you can figure it out yourself. Me’n her had a hell of a time.”

“There are more of us?”

“Of _us_ ,” she corrected disdainfully. “You and… yours. We’re not a part of that.” She glanced at Nicky again, and Joe’s hackles raised. He could shoot his arm between the bars and throttle her, but there wouldn’t be any steps to take after that – he was sure she didn’t have keys to the cell for his escape – and if she was telling the truth… if she really was Esen’s daughter, she had lived almost as long as he had.

She turned to leave, but Joe halted her with a cry.

“Wait! Was… Was her life happy? Esen. Did she have a good life?”

The woman’s eyes narrowed. “You should have come to see that for yourself.” She left, the departing words ringing in Joe’s ears, and he slid down the bars, leaning his forehead against the cold metal.

It was only moments before she was back, startling him. He’d been in for a long haul, shivering in the cold room.

“What’s the temperature in here?” he asked her as she came back in through the door, holding a small rounded hardshell case.

“Sixteen,” the woman said, back to conversational. She went to Nicky’s cell door and pulled keys from the pocket of her berry-colored cardigan.

“What are you doing?” Joe demanded next, as the door swung open and she stepped inside.

“Boss’s plan.”

“Hey! _Hey!_ Get the fuck away from him!”

The woman crouched beside Nicky’s body, pushing him gently onto his back to free his arm. She put the hardshell case on the floor and rolled Nicky’s sleeve up past the crook of his elbow.

“Stop! Get away from him!”

“I had to dose him extra to keep him down for longer,” the woman said casually. “Boss was very specific about you being awake to see this.”

“You fucking bitch—”

“It’ll last about an hour. Just so you don’t go tearing your hair out.”

“What will? What is that? What are you doing?”

She pulled a medical-grade syringe from the case and wiped the fold of Nicky’s elbow with an antiseptic wipe, her movements assured, practiced. Medical training, for sure.

“Please don’t,” Joe begged, trying to shake the bars of his cell between his hands, but they were installed well and didn’t budge. “Please, whatever you’re doing, do it to me instead.”

The woman laughed. “Boss said you’d say that.”

“Please. Tell Quỳnh I will see her, I’ll talk to her, I’ll do anything.”

She glanced over at him, not hiding her impression at his deduction. She flicked a fingernail against the syringe she had prepared from a rubber-topped vial, loosening the air bubbles.

“Tell me what’s going to happen,” he pleaded. “Are you killing him?”

“We can’t die,” she said, as if this was news to him. “Not even this will kill him. I checked your mortalities right before you woke up, so rest assured there.”

“What is it? Please!”

She injected the needle and pressed the plunger. Joe had no more words left; he gripped the bars of his cell so hard his hands ached, his eyes fixed on Nicky’s still face.

She cleaned up the wrappings left over from the procedure, rolled Nicky’s sleeve back down, packed up her case, and stepped out of the cell to lock it behind her, all with the air of a country doctor doing a home visit. She turned to Joe. “My name’s Handan.”

“Go _fuck_ yourself,” he spat.

She sighed, unoffended. “I’ll see you later, Yusuf.”

Joe lunged for her through the bars with clawed fingers, missing the fabric of her cardigan by inches as she stepped away. She hadn’t even flinched. In a breath she was gone through the door, after stopping to pick up the book she had left on the seat of the chair.

Joe’s entire attention, his whole being, went back to Nicky. “Nicky,” he panted. “Nicolò, wake up for me. Please, please, wake up.”

Up until now, Nicky had been deeply unconscious, breathing the mechanical breaths of base brain function, but after several long moments that seemed to stretch from Joe’s worry, there was a blip. Nicky made a single noise, a tiny moan in the back of his throat.

“Nicky? Nicky!”

The pace of his breathing sped up, sharp through his nose, and he moaned again.

“Nicky, say something.”

“Mmm,” Nicky whined.

“What is it? Nicky, what is it?”

“No.”

“What?”

“No. No. Stop.”

“Nicky, I’m here, I’m here.”

“Stop, please, please stop it.”

“Nicky,” Joe cried. “Nicky, I’m right here. What’s happening?”

“No, please,” Nicky moaned. His face was completely white, and his eyes were still closed. Only his lips moved to speak as his chest rose and fell in rapid, panting breaths. “Please, stop it. It hurts.”

Joe threw himself against the bars of the cell once, twice. “Nicky, I’m coming, I swear, I’m coming.”

Nicky’s voice raised, and the wounded noises from deep in his chest began to pick up their pace. “It hurts! Stop! Joe!”

“Nicolò!” Joe screamed, throwing himself against the steel bars again. Tears were streaming down his face.

“Joe! Please! Joe, help me.”

“I’m coming, baby, I’m coming!” Joe sobbed, blinded by his tears and his hate and his fear. “Wake up, please wake up!”

“Joe! _Joe!!_ ”

Joe howled. He blooded his hands against the bars, threw his body against them, and screamed.

Nicky screamed too, his pleading words melting into weeping. His body was rigid, his bare toes curled in on themselves, his hands fisted, but he lay flat on his back as if he’d been strapped to a gurney. Tears had begun to roll down the sides of his cheeks from his closed eyes.

It lasted, true to Handan’s word, for an hour.

The sound of the door opening brought Joe back to his senses. He was huddled in the corner between the bars and one wall, his head on his arms as he’d drawn tight into himself. Nicky had finally quieted, but he hadn’t yet awoken. Joe hoped that meant that whatever it had been, whatever trauma had been inflicted, would be left behind in his unconsciousness. The last thing he wanted was for Nicky to remember.

Two new people came through the white door, holding a limp Nile between them, her toes dragging on the floor. Joe tried to look at the faces of the captors, but he was drawn too much to Nile’s form instead. He didn’t think he would be able to take it if Handan came back with a dose for her.

Behind this trio came a pair, a single captor escorting a pale, bedraggled Booker.

“Joe?” Booker whispered as they passed. He was bloody, recently beaten judging from the way he stumbled, the way he didn’t fight.

One of the two captors holding Nile broke off to open the door to a third cell, beside Nicky’s so Joe could see inside. The woman holding Nile alone for the moment hefted her in her arms, took a few duck-walking steps into the cell, and dropped her heavily to the floor, and Booker made a vocal noise of protest.

“In with her,” said the man holding Booker, shoving him, and Booker went without complaint, immediately kneeling to roll Nile and check on her.

Joe looked blearily up at the faces of the three as they passed his cell again, his eyes and head heavy. The salt from his tears and sweat had dried, stinging, on his face.

“Joe,” Booker said.

“How is she?” His voice was completely flat.

His brother went back to Nile, having pulled her head and torso into his lap, supporting her back with one arm. “She’s alive.”

“Did they drug you?”

“For the ride.” Booker’s voice was mottled with fatigue and old wounds. “It was Quỳnh, in my apartment. She had me and tricked Nile into coming.”

Joe wanted so desperately to sleep. “Where is this?”

“I tried to check the time in the van when I woke up. It was almost a full day’s drive from Paris.”

“Behind the Iron Curtain.”

“Deep into the Warsaw Pact,” Booker agreed. “Nicky?”

“Cell next to yours. Comatose.”

“Why?”

“We were drugged in Germany. They gave him something extra.”

Booker looked down at Nile, her cheek cupped in his hand.

“You would know if they gave it to her.”

“How?”

Joe’s throat tightened almost shut. “You would know.”

“It was Quỳnh, Joe.”

“I know. They’re immortals too.”

This brought nearly thirty seconds of silence. Then: “Andy?”

“I don’t know.” Joe put his head back down on his arms. He’d thought he had cried through all the water in his body, but he managed to find just a bit more.


	3. Chapter 3

Andy was perched on the single window seat of their safehouse living room, hugging her knees. She had started a fire in the fireplace, and it crackled pleasantly in the stillness of the rest of the house.

She had been alone for a few hours at this point; Nile was still out screwing her way through Neu-Isenburg, and Joe and Nicky hadn’t returned from their shopping trip. Andy rubbed her thumb on the smooth screen of her cell phone where it hung from one hand around her legs, gazing absently out the window. The pull to text Booker had never been stronger, and she knew it was partially because she was desperately lonely, more than she’d felt in a few centuries, and nothing except the warm whiskey-and-leather smell he brought into the room would make it feel better. But she had to respect the others, and Booker himself. She would be doing him no favors by inserting herself back into his life while he was supposed to be atoning for the very real, very serious breach of trust.

But her thumb rubbed, rubbed, rubbed.

With an annoyed, throaty sound, she unfolded her knees and brought the screen to life. _Get marshmallows_ , she texted Joe.

She put it down on the cushion, back to staring outside. This safehouse was one of her favorites in Europe; white-washed, a modern build with luxurious plumbing and heating, it had been one of the first erected in the development, the show house for the suburb that popped up around it, and she had snagged it under the guise of a shell corporation when its siblings went for sale. It was conveniently close to the airport, but its proximity to its neighbors wasn’t ideal, and they only used it as a planned outing rather than as an emergency retreat, like the church and cave in France. If they ever needed to flee something bad, they had other, less-comfortable but significantly more private safehouses nearby in western Germany.

There was green everywhere, though, preferable to the drab grey or sun-bleached tan of more urban retreats like London, Budapest, or Istanbul. She had always loved forests; after spending a millennium on scrub plains and flatland steppes, she had delighted in the haunted, shadowed difference of coniferous forests, deep dark shadows in the deep dark woods. She and Nile had taken a walk on a nearby hiking trail their first day here, and she was looking forward to doing it again.

She checked her phone after a few minutes of this moping. Joe hadn’t texted back. She switched over to the chat log she had running with Nicky. _Are you on your way back?_

She waited, looking at the screen expectantly. Both men were usually good at replying quickly. They had all delighted in the technologic advancements of communication since the beginning of the Information Age, at least before they had seen how easy it was to be tracked down. But Copley had explained his security measures, tying their phones together on the network that was impossible to be broken into from the outside, and ever since they had reveled in the joy of smart phones, rather than the one-and-done use of burner bricks from the early aughts. At least within their own family, they could text and communicate, faster and across more distance than at any time in human history, and Andy, while ever wary of the idea of so much information floating so far from its origin, utilized it to the utmost. They had individual chats and a large group chat, which Nile had set up when she tired of asking the same question multiple times.

Andy went to that group chat now, reading back the last few messages on it. They had been in pairs right before coming back together here, with Andy and Nile undergoing an immersion tour in Madrid while Joe and Nicky sunned in Nice. Nile was taking on her first language: high school, Latino-American Spanish turning into European Spanish with the help of a friendly month-long immersion course involving a tourist’s idea of culture and community. Andy had tagged along more for the sport, and to stick with Nile who had asked for at least one of them. Andy in no way thought that Nile couldn’t handle herself alone, but there was something to be said about having a friendly face alongside what had to be one of the most difficult transitions known to man. If Nile wanted her, she would go. And it had been hilarious sitting in the back of the classroom with sunglasses on, silently judging the overeager instructor’s attempts to engage his half-drunk, pasty-white students.

When the course ended, with Nile reciting verb conjugations in the passenger seat, they had driven the several hundred miles to pick up their brothers in France, looking pleasantly smug and rested, before continuing to this Frankfurt safehouse, preparing to spend at least a few weeks of autumnal hideaway bliss among the changing of the leaves.

 _Anyone active?_ she wrote in the group chat, waiting for the pop of their icons to show that they had seen.

After five minutes, she began to worry. At fifteen, she stood and walked out the front door, hurrying into her jacket while dialing a new number.

“Andromache,” answered Copley, who either preferred the mythological sound of the name he had studied her by or didn’t feel companionable enough to use her nickname.

“You can track our phones,” she said, hustling down the sidewalk towards the city center, where Joe and Nicky had gone.

“Yes.”

“Track them.”

“Whose?”

“All three.”

“What’s going on?”

“They’re not answering me.”

“All three of them?”

“No.”

She heard silence on the other end of the line for several long breaths as she jogged, passing two mothers pushing bundled prams.

“Well?”

“The system is looking,” he said.

“We’re in Germany.”

“I see you. I don’t see the others.”

“How is that possible?” she demanded, a raw anger to her voice.

“If the phones are off—”

“Turn them on!”

“It doesn’t work that way,” he said patiently. “I don’t control them from this side, I can only see what information they give off. If the phones are switched off, there’s no information to receive.”

“Then what good are you?!” she cried, just as she stepped onto the cobblestoned high street, eliciting at least one affronted glance from a local judging her loud English outburst.

“How long have they been gone?”

Andy thought back. Unless Joe or Nicky had received a text from her in the time since her check-in the afternoon before, Nile had officially been MIA since 2pm the previous afternoon. Perhaps even earlier, back to when she had left the safehouse for destinations unknown, if the text couldn’t be trusted, which Andy was now fearing with a sick feeling in her gut. Joe and Nicky were more recent, a few hours gone at most, depending on when they had been snatched. She was sure, now, that they had been. They didn’t turn their phones off, ever, for precisely this reason.

She relayed this, all of it, to Copley, even her failing at getting more information from Nile. She should have asked more questions. There was little privacy in their family; there was no room for it, when four, then five, then four again, adults lived together in such close proximity, sharing such intimacy that there wasn’t even a word for it. Andy had known when Booker was out fucking prostitutes, just as she knew when Joe and Nicky were having a fight, just as she knew Nile was still having nightmares.

“Don’t panic,” Copley said, and Andy almost reached through the phone line to bury her teeth into his neck.

“We don’t do this,” she snapped. “We don’t disappear, _ever_ , unless it’s someone like you.”

He sighed, just barely audible over the connection. He was still living with the guilt of what he had almost inflicted on them, on the world, with his misguided attempts to change it. Fucking good. He deserved almost as much punishment as Booker. Both men had been naïve, and both had cost a lot of people their lives and shattered centuries' worth of trust.

“Where are you headed?” he asked, probably hearing the very slight increase to her breathing as she jogged.

“Into the village, where Joe and Nicky were. They haven’t come home.”

“I’m looking into it. I’ll see if there’s any radio chatter I can intercept.”

Once again, he horrified her with the powers he had. A simple private radio channel, broken into in seconds. Their team had rarely used radios between them while on a strike mission, and she was gratified for it now. Any of their private words and thoughts could have been stolen from them by a single man sitting behind a powerful computer with a satellite connection.

“Anything?” she snapped, making it to the end of the high street and turning back. Shoppers bundled in scarves were milling in the grey afternoon light, crossing the pedestrian road with their bags and parcels.

“Nothing, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t anything before. If they’re gone now—”

“Don’t say this is my fault,” she snarled, thinking it herself. If she had noticed the absence sooner, she could have made it in time to stop whatever had happened.

“Of course not,” Copley said, confused. “I don’t think it is.”

 _But it is_ , she thought to herself, her chest tightening. _Of course it is. Again_. She swiveled on the spot, the phone still pressed tightly to her ear with one hand, and spotted a coffee cart a few meters from her.

She had to wait in line behind an elderly woman ordering hot chocolate for two well-behaved children, her foot tapping once, twice, before she forcibly stopped herself. Her nervous energy needed to be coiled, wound tight into a weapon to be used later, not spent on useless gestures.

The college-aged barista behind the small window greeted her with a smile and a Bavarian accent. “What can I—”

“I’m looking for my friends,” she interrupted. “Two men, tall, one with short brown hair, one with dark curly hair and a full beard. Have you seen them?”

“I think so,” he replied, his eyes squinting in recollection. “They stood over there at that table. They spoke to someone else, a woman, and then they left.”

“How long ago?”

“The very beginning of my shift. At least three hours.”

“What did the woman look like?” she asked, wondering impossibly if it was Nile, if the three had come together again before disappearing.

“Dark curly hair.”

“Was she young? Black?”

“No, she was white. I don’t remember anything else specific about her. They didn’t leave together.”

Andy nodded, distracted, looking back out at the plaza, at the table the barista had indicated. “Thank you,” she said without looking at him, turning away. “Did you get all that?”

Copley hummed an affirmative. “My German’s good. Three hours ago. I’m looking for security cam footage from around where your GPS signal is right now. Don’t move.”

She looked at building corners, at lamp posts, not seeing any obvious CCTV. “Copley,” she murmured, a crack in her armor she regretted as soon as it had happened.

“We’ll find them, Andromache.”

“If it’s like last time—”

“You’ll do what needs to be done,” he said softly. “Just like last time.”

Andy stifled a scream of outrage. How many times would their liberties be threatened? How many times would their mere existences be challenged, overwritten, castigated?

“Okay.”

She straightened her posture, as if in preparation to fight. “What?”

“I see them. The quality is low, but it’s definitely them.”

“Where did they go?”

“I’m watching. They’re at the table.” Pause. “Now they’re speaking to—oh no.”

“ _What?_ ”

“They’re speaking to the curly-haired woman, but… they were drugged.”

“What?” she said for a third time, in a third different way, feeling as uselessly impotent as if she had been declawed, defanged, blinded, and thrown into a bear pit.

“While their backs were turned. It was slick, only noticeable if you were looking for it. They’re… they’re drinking their coffees and leaving.”

“Which way?”

“Back down the high street, the exact route you took to get there.”

For a wild moment she thought he had eyes on her too, somehow, but then she remembered he’d been tracking her GPS while on the call with her. It was like magic, except it was wielded less by scholars who had studied and practiced and more by nosy, antisocial brats.

She retraced her steps.

“I lose sight of them when they turn down the next coming street—yes, that one. There are no more cameras… hang on.” Another pause. “I’ve got them again. A worse camera than before, but… all right.” His voice went clipped, preparatory. “They stop right there.”

Andy stopped, right where they had. A family pharmacy stood on her right; to her left was a bakery, warm, yeasty smells coming from the door as it opened and shut behind a woman with a large, dark loaf wrapped in her hands. The two of them exchanged nods as Andy stepped closer to the storefront out of her way. “Then what?”

“They stop,” he said.

“You said that.”

“I mean… they’re being affected by the drug.”

Andy closed her eyes in pain, almost glad she doesn’t have to watch the footage. “What happened?”

“They fall. The woman with curly hair is coming up to them. And a van, a panel van.”

“Can you read the license plate?”

“No, but I’ll follow it with more cameras until I can.”

“What happens to them?”

“They’re unconscious. They get put into the back of the van.”

“Who are they?”

“The curly-haired woman and a man. He has a cap on, I can’t see his face.”

“Just the two of them?”

“Yes.”

Andy squeezed her free hand into a fist.

“This is a good start,” Copley murmured. “We can find them.”

Her phone vibrated once against her ear, making her jump and swear.

“What?!”

“A text,” she said loudly to the screen as she looked down at it. “I’ll call you back.”

“No, you can—”

She hung up the call with a press of the red button and switched over to the notification she had received. It was from an unknown number, no text within the message itself. Only an audio file.

With minute apprehension, she thumb-pressed the play button.

Screams filled the air, running her blood, her very soul, cold, and she paused it frantically. Too public. She couldn’t listen to this with civilian ears around. She already knew what it was.

The five-minute walk back to the safehouse turned into a one-and-a-half-minute sprint. Sides heaving, she stepped through the front door and leaned up against it, knowing she’d need the support. Without giving herself time, she played the audio file again.

It was two voices. Joe and Nicky. She’d know their sounds through any distress, any emotion, any nuance. One of them was screaming in pain. The other was terrified. Andy was not a tearful person; she rarely cried the way Joe or Booker did, matching Nicky for a much more internal expression of her own sadness or pain or exhaustion. But now, listening to this, she felt the burn at the corners of her eyes.

Nicky was screaming, long, sustained wails of agony, and Joe was screaming too, frantic cries to hold on, hold on, hold on.

“Fuck,” Andy whispered. She dialed Copley again, her hands shaking.

“What was it?”

“A text. From the people who have them.”

“What did it say?”

“It wasn’t a message. It was audio.”

Copley breathed, swore under his breath. “Of what?” he asked, in a way that made her think he already knew.

“I’ll send it to you. Tell me if you can get anything from it.”

“Forward it to me with the sender’s information attached. Do you know how to do that?”

“No,” she said, frustrated and inadequate.

“That’s okay. Just send it to me, and I’ll go from there. Don’t hang up this time. You can do it with the phone call active.”

Andy slid down the door to the safehouse, ending up hunched at the foot of it, while she pressed inputs, her eyes following the unfamiliar pathways of the steps.

“Okay, I got it. I’ll…” There was a longer pause, presumably while Copley listened to it, but she couldn’t hear it being played over the connection. “Fuck,” he said after a moment, coming back to her.

“It’s them. It’s Joe and Nicky.”

“Okay,” he said, steeling himself, steeling her. He was CIA; he had known torture. He had never known it from someone he knew, someone, Andy was sure, he liked. “I can try to follow this back from the unknown sender. It’s going to take some time. Andy… I think you should come be with me here.”

“What?”

“They’re almost surely not in Germany anymore. You’re alone.”

“I’m fine,” she snarled. “I need to be close by in case—”

“You don’t know where close is, I’m afraid.” He was speaking in a patient, superior-officer voice. He was giving her an order without making it seem like one. “It would be better if you were off the streets.”

“I can go underground better than you ever—”

“Andromache, if you go radio silent, I’ll have no way of knowing if you were taken too. We need to work together to find them.”

She snarled silently, her teeth bared at the empty room. She had left the fire burning in the fireplace, a careless mistake.

“Please. Let me help you.”

She covered her face with her free hand. “Okay,” she muttered, the sound half-muffled by the heel of her palm. “I’ll be there in a few hours.”

“Keep your phone on.”

“I will.”

“I’ll see you soon.”

“Thank you, Copley.”

He hesitated, then: “Anything for your team.”

She hung up. Stood. Shook the tensions from her arms, and went to pack.

It was night. The lights centered above each cell and in the middle of the open space beside them had turned off at one point a few hours before, save for a lone wall sconce just beside the white door. Now it gave off a dim glow, just enough for Booker to see the outline of the bars of Joe’s cell across and to their left.

Nile and Nicky had both eventually awoken, within minutes of each other, groaning and disoriented, but Nicky had fared far worse from whatever extra chemical he had been given. He hadn’t responded to their soft calls for several minutes after waking, even with Joe’s desperate attempts to get him to answer him. Booker had watched Joe huddle in the corner, reaching his arm through the bars to just about the halfway point between the cells. If Nicky had crawled forward and stuck his arm through, they could have touched fingertips. But he didn’t.

Nile was a little better. She had been down in one way or another since the moment Quỳnh had jumped her from behind, so she’d lost about a full day, but she recovered with lots of whispered questions that Booker tried to answer, bringing her up to speed with the combined knowledge bases both he and Joe had shared, and she filled in her own gaps where she could.

Quỳnh was behind all of it, they knew. The others involved, the supposed other immortals, were much more tenuous. Joe told them of the one called Handan, the one with medical knowledge and a connection to his and Nicky’s own shared past, but they hadn’t learned the names or backstories of the others. Their immortality had not yet been tested – neither Booker and Nile nor Joe and Nicky had gotten the chance to see if they healed after being cut, or stabbed, or shot, or broken, all of which was the plan now – but there wasn’t much else of an explanation, unless Quỳnh had hired mercenaries, told them the truth about her and the others she had once called family, and ordered them to pretend.

One of them, a tall desi man with a beard rivaling Joe’s, though his was streaked with grey, had come in a little before what had been deemed as nightfall, distributing plastic-wrapped sandwiches with Cyrillic writing on the sticker labels. He slipped them through the bars, not responding to questions or insults, and came back a moment later with large liter-sized plastic water bottles. Booker had shouted Russian insults dating back to the Napoleonic wars at his back, and Nile had reached for a sandwich.

“Don’t,” Joe said dully. “They could be poisoned.”

Nile hesitated, then unwrapped the cling film. “I’ll be the guinea pig,” she said. “If I die, we’ll know.”

She had taken a single bite, grimacing at the dry bread and low-quality sliced turkey, but nothing had happened five, ten, thirty minutes later, and she’d finished it off quickly, gulping down the water from her bottle. Booker had gone ahead with his, the first food he’d been given in more than three days, and he’d seen Joe forcing it down himself, quietly encouraging Nicky across from him.

Booker desperately wished he could see Nicky as well. Joe still hadn’t told him what had been done, but it was bad. Nicky had finally spoken a few hours later, asking about Nile and Booker, and the two of them had crawled to the corner where they would be closest to him, sticking their hands between the bars to flutter their fingers at him. He had not reached for them back.

When the lights had gone off, the four of them had quieted to the point of hibernation. Joe hadn’t moved from his corner, where he was as absolutely close as he could be to Nicky, but Booker and Nile had retreated back to their far corner opposite the toilet. He had pressed himself against the walls, head drooped, arms and legs both crossed, until Nile had slipped in beside him, clutching his upper arm. He’d unfolded himself then, encircling her with it, and she’d laid her head on his shoulder, shivering slightly with the cold. Joe had told them their captors were keeping the room at 16 degrees C, damnably cold but more uncomfortable than dangerous. Just another kick in the balls.

They’d slept for a few hours. Booker’s three-day-long ordeal with Quỳnh already felt more like a dream than something he’d so recently survived, and he knew the large swathes of hours that he couldn’t remember wouldn’t be coming back. Some things would be lost to time, as they had always been.

The lights turned on suddenly, an unexpected change that made Booker and Nile jerk to standing, adrenaline and hearts racing. The door to the room was opening, and the four captors they had seen before filed in. Booker went to the bars, Nile right beside him.

There were two men and two women. One, Handan, the curly-haired woman, was in the lead. The man who had given them the sandwiches was just behind her. He was the one who had walked Booker into the building from the van. He was deceptively strong beneath the willowy build.

“This one,” said Handan, indicating Joe in his cell.

“What are you doing?” Booker asked. “Hey! Tell Quỳnh we want to speak to her.”

“Oh, she knows,” the woman said, grinning at him over her shoulder. Then she returned her attention to her compatriots. “He’ll fight,” she said, stepping back so the man could unlock the doors. “Go in hard.”

“Stop,” came Nicky’s small voice, to Booker’s left. “Don’t do it, please.”

“What is she doing?” Booker asked him.

“Please!”

Joe had retreated all the way back into his cell, deeper than Booker could see from his angle. “Come in here, you die,” he heard him say.

“Go, Kiran,” the woman said. She was holding a hardshell case in her hands, like the ones which protected portable electronic equipment.

“Please don’t!” Nicky cried.

“It’s all right, Nicolò,” Joe said to him in Arabic.

“Stay away from him!” Nile shouted beside Booker.

The captors opened the cell door, letting it swing outward, and the two men went in first as Handan stepped to the side in the aisle, waiting. The second woman, a thin, very pale platinum-blonde, watched from the open space, her hands on her hips.

Booker pressed his face to the bars, trying to see, but they were spaced too close together for him to get good leverage on a better angle, and he could only follow the sounds of the scuffle: muffled grunts, the meaty blows of fists onto flesh, one or two affronted cries when someone got a good kick on someone else.

Nicky was muttering a constant stream of too-fast Italian, vowing vengeance on their families and friends and souls. Nile moaned softly beside Booker. “What is it?” she whispered to him.

“Nothing good,” Booker said, his stomach aching with fear. The room was chaos, overlapping voices and threats of violence from all sides.

There was a loud shout and a crack, and one of the men staggered backwards just enough that Booker could see the blood and gore of a compound fracture on his forearm.

“Don’t—Don’t kill him!” Handan shouted, but the fighting died down suddenly, and Nicky banged on the bars of his cell, calling them all sons of the dirtiest, most flea-bitten whores.

“All right,” Handan said huffily, checking her wristwatch. “Wait for him to come back.”

“He broke my arm!” said the man, affronted, stepping into Booker’s line of sight to show her the injury as it popped and squelched back into place.

“They’re really like us,” Nile whispered in horror. It hadn’t been real, truly real, until then.

“You should have dodged that last move left instead of right,” said the blonde woman, speaking for the first time. She had the barest hint of a Scandinavian accent, rolling her syllables like they were pebbles on her tongue.

“I don’t see you in here,” retorted the man. He was the youngest of them by appearance, just out of his teen years, but Booker also thought he might also be the youngest by lifetime age, judging by the way the others rolled their eyes at him. His skin tone was a medium-beige, his hair and eyes as dark as Joe’s, and he had a round jaw and very full lips.

Handan tapped her toe on the ground. “Come on,” she muttered, stretching it out like she was anxiously awaiting a train.

“He’s coming back,” came another voice inside the cell, the Indian man, who spoke his English with a posh British accent.

“Glad to have you with us,” Handan said brightly to Joe, who was reviving somewhere inside the cell, too far in for Booker to see, and he wanted to bend the steel beneath his palms, to gnaw through stone and concrete, to get to him, to get to all of them, and he wanted to tear and twist and carve their flesh with his bare hands.

“Joe,” Nicky moaned once.

“It’s all right,” came Joe’s tired voice.

“I’ll be here for you through all of it, I promise. I’m here with you.”

“I know.”

Handan went into the cell now, and Booker shouted at them in French, his anxiety making his head rush. The blonde woman glanced at him and Nile, her heavy-lidded eyes mild.

There was silence for a few long moments as whatever was happening inside the cell went off without further violence.

“Nicky, tell us what it is,” Nile said quietly.

Handan came out of Joe’s cell, followed by the two men. She smiled at Nile and Booker as if she was seeing them for the first time. “It’s pain,” she said.

Nicky whimpered.

The captors filed out after shutting the door to Joe’s cell, leaving him hidden behind the walls, and the door closed behind the last of them. The lights stayed on, blazing artificially above.

“Joe,” Booker murmured. “Joe. Are you all right?”

The waiting was the hardest part, and for a brief, irrational moment, Booker was glad when Joe made a noise.

Then the screaming began, and he would have given anything in the world to make it stop.

Joe came back to himself and the rest of them slowly, murmuring weakly when Nicky finally reached for him through the bars. Joe had no strength nor, Nicky said later, the desire to reach back.

“It hurts to move for a long time after,” he explained softly. “It hurts to touch and be touched. Your clothes, the ground beneath you…”

Nile had retreated away from the sound of his pain, crouched and rocking slightly in the back corner on the flats of her feet, her ears cupped beneath her hands. Booker had touched her on the shoulder, checking, but she hadn’t responded, and he’d gone away again, back to the bars, where he was determinedly learning the locking mechanism of the cell door, not taking in anything of what he was inspecting because of Joe’s screams.

When they finally died down, when he finally caught his breath after an hour of it, Booker told them what had happened in his apartment. He told them everything Quỳnh had said or asked or insinuated. Without wanting or expecting praise, he told them he had never given them up, not even when she had heated her knife over a candle flame and carved words in Vietnamese into his skin. Though he didn’t give those details.

Joe finally, finally reappeared at the threshold of Booker’s line of sight, crawling forward so that they could see he was all right. Nile returned to the corner nearest Nicky, kneeling beside the bars, and told them she loved them, that she was sorry she had fallen for Quỳnh’s trick with Booker’s cell phone, that this was her fault.

“It’s no one’s fault, Nile,” Nicky said, quick to absolve. “Except Quỳnh’s. She and this group are the only ones doing it.”

“Where is Andy?” Nile asked next, shaking her head, unaccepting of Nicky’s kindness.

“She might have escaped,” Booker said.

“Or Quỳnh hasn’t gone for her yet,” Joe said tightly, breathing shallow like his ribs were broken.

“Save your strength,” Nicky hushed.

“It’s only been us,” Joe said. “Me and Nicky. The ones who knew her, and failed her.”

“Maybe it’s supposed to be one at a time,” Nile said softly, and Booker put his hand on her shoulder beside him, knowing she was imagining the pain Joe had gone through coursing through her veins next.

“No. She hurt Booker for the information, not for… revenge. And she killed Nile painlessly, just to get her down. It’s about us. Me and Nicky and Andy.”

Nile moved to sit cross-legged, leaning the side of her head up against the plastered side wall. She snorted at something that had probably gone through her mind, her eyes closing in derision. Booker decided not to ask about it.

“I think we should try to get more sleep,” he said to the group at large. “Who knows what the fuck time it is, but it’ll be good for us to recover as much as we can.”

Nile didn’t move from her spot near the corner, but she did put out a hand for Booker, pulling him to sit beside her again. He did, putting his back against the wall. It wasn’t fair that they got to sleep like this and Nicky and Joe did not, but, he supposed, that was part of whatever sick punishment Quỳnh had enacted for them. The two of them were being forced to go through unimaginable circles of hellish pain while the other watched impotently, unable even to offer comfort when it was over. Booker shuddered, horrified by the depths Quỳnh had reached, terrified by the idea that she still potentially had so far to go. If she was plumbing the bottom reaches of the ocean of her hate, there were still miles and miles of black, endless sea beneath them.


	4. Chapter 4

The lights were still on when Nile woke. She could have been asleep ten minutes or ten hours; her exhaustion levels were no different. Booker was asleep beside her, his cheek on the top of her head. She waited a beat, apprehensive, and heard the sound that had woken her again. “Book,” she whispered, air instead of voice, and she felt him awaken with just the slightest movement in his chest.

They listened together, their backs to the wall between their cell and Nicky’s; anyone coming into the room through the white door would not be able to see them until they came fully down the aisle between the box of four cells.

The white door was opening and shutting, not so much a creak as just a disturbance in the otherwise funereal stillness of the room. There were footsteps, tiny and light, and then the platinum-blonde immortal was standing at the door to their cell, looking down at them.

Nile glared at her, but her belly swooped with anxiety as the woman produced a set of keys in one hand and unlocked the door. Immediately Booker and Nile were on their feet, backing away to the rear of the cell like the caged prisoners they were, and Nile tested the balance in her cold, bare feet. If the woman made a single wrong move, Nile would lunge for her and take her down with her.

“There’s not a lot of time,” the woman said, opening the cell door as wide as it could go and stepping backwards.

Before Nile could react, Booker had shoved past her, knocking one shoulder into hers in his speed, which was remarkable, and the woman’s throat was in his hands, her body elevated against the bars of the empty cells opposite theirs, her heels kicking.

“Nile,” Booker ordered, but she was already coming forward too, reaching high and grabbing at the woman’s wrist where her hands were scrabbling against Booker’s around her neck, forcing her fingers open to release the keys that were held tight in her fist in her panic.

“I’m—I’m trying to—” choked the woman, but Booker shook her once, like a bloodhound with a dead rabbit hanging from its jaws.

Nile went to Nicky’s cell, her shaking hands struggling with the keychain. There were three keys hanging from it, and she found the correct one on her second try. The key slid home and turned, and Nile threw open the door, reaching for Nicky like he was adrift at sea. Their hands found each other, and she pulled him close, onto the lifeboat, before turning for Joe’s cell. Behind them, Booker was throttling the woman, doing it slow, letting it last.

“Tell me why I shouldn’t break your neck,” Booker snarled, his accent going thick with his rage.

“I’m here to help,” the woman managed, tears of suffocation falling down her cheeks. “I want to—”

Booker shook her again. “You’re lying!”

“I swear,” she cried, her fingers digging at Booker’s and finding no purchase. Her kicking heels had lessened their frantic search for a step, but the soles of her shoes still slid up and down, up and down the smooth bars, as if she could support herself against the strangulation, her own body weight betraying her in Booker’s elevated grasp.

Nile and Nicky were holding Joe between them in the aisle, watching this. “We don’t have time,” Nile said to Booker. “They could be coming.”

“They’re not,” the woman said throatily. “Kiran is out getting groceries. Handan and Oscar are asleep. It’s my turn on duty. I can lead you—”

“You are staying _the fuck_ away from my family,” Booker said, tightening his grip so that she gasped worse than ever. Her face was turning red, shocking against her pale skin and hair.

“Please—”

“Let’s hear what she has to say,” Nicky said softly. “Put her in a cell.”

Booker turned his head, breathing heavily, making eye contact with Nicky. Then he lowered her, slowly, to the ground. When her feet touched the floor, her knees buckled, but she regained her balance, her own hands going to rub at her throat, where Booker’s had left angry red marks. She stepped obediently into the cell Booker and Nile had just vacated, turning to stand centered in the wall of bars as they closed the door behind her, though not with the satisfying crash Nile wanted, because they had to be quiet now, in case the others could hear.

The four of them lined up before her, a tribunal against one prisoner, and she lowered her chin in deference.

“My name is Tora Grímsdóttir,” she said, starting immediately. “I died in 619 CE.”

“When did you meet Quỳnh?” Joe asked.

“In 1749. I had known Kiran for about—”

“You are a fucking _liar_ ,” Joe said, his voice elevating as he took a threatening step forward.

“What?”

“Tell us the truth, or I’ll go find that serum and give you enough to last a hundred years.”

“It is the truth!” she protested.

“We lost Quỳnh to the iron maiden in 1565,” Nicky said. “There’s no way you could have met her two hundred years later.”

Tora’s shoulders sagged. “I swear,” she said softly. “Quỳnh told us everything. She escaped from the sea in 1676.”

Joe and Nicky were rocked by this. Nile had to put a bracing hand on Joe’s upper arm beside her as he staggered backwards again.

“How?” Booker growled.

“The iron rusted. Disintegrated. She was able to kick free and make it to the surface. She floated for a few days before getting back to land.”

“No,” Joe said, turning back and stepping as close to the bars as he could get, his fury radiating from him. “No. If she was out a hundred years later—”

“One hundred and eleven.”

“No!”

“She told us,” Tora said miserably. “She met Handan first, only a few decades later. She had been waiting for you—”

“God, no, no,” Joe whispered, sinking to the floor, his hands fisted in his hair.

“She asked us if we knew of other immortals. She told us your names and your stories. We went out looking. We never stopped looking.”

Joe made another noise of pain, and Nicky lowered himself into a crouch beside him, an arm around his back, whispering to him.

Tora looked away from their grief. “Quỳnh… she changed, the longer time went on. The longer we went without finding Andromache. Without hearing that Andromache was looking for her.”

Nile’s stomach was twisting. Her legs were itching to run, to never stop running.

“Our dreams,” Booker said. “Mine and Nile’s. We never saw her free in the world. In our dreams she was always under the sea.”

“I don’t know about that,” Tora said. “We never had those dreams. We had to find each other by luck, Kiran and I, and later, Handan and Oscar finding Quỳnh.”

“But if we had known… we didn’t know.”

Tora shook her head. “Quỳnh always said Andromache and Yusuf and Nicolò would find her. She never said how.”

Joe gagged. Nicky held him in both arms now. Nile stepped forward around them, as if to block them from Tora’s awful truths.

“Why are you helping her?” she demanded. “Can’t you see that she’s crazy?”

Tora flinched. “I can now. But you have to… When we finally found Quỳnh, after centuries of being alone, it felt incredible. Kiran and I had been alone together for so long that we had forgotten what family felt like. Quỳnh was like a beacon of light. She had answers we had never had. She was old, older than all of us, even Kiran. We were awed by her. But then…” She glanced at Booker and then looked away, and Nile felt a surge of protectiveness.

“What?”

“Then there was a new one. Of your kind, with the dreams.”

“Why didn’t any of you have the dreams?”

“We don’t know. Handan has a theory—”

“Which is?”

Tora spread her hands. “You all died at the hands of another person. We all died of accidents, or illness. Handan thinks that might have something to do with it. Maybe being killed by someone else means you get connected. We truly don’t know.”

Nile glanced at each of her brothers, cataloguing it. Joe and Nicky had killed each other, the first time they died. Booker had been killed on a battlefield and then had later been hung as a deserter, two quick deaths by foes and friends alike. Andy… she didn’t know Andy’s first death, but it wasn’t hard to believe that it had also been with violence. She put a hand to her throat, a subconscious movement she didn’t even realize she had made.

“We have to talk to Quỳnh,” came the mottled sound of Joe’s voice, as he raised his head from the contorted circle of two sets of arms holding each other.

“You have get out of here!” Tora retorted sharply. “Quỳnh won’t be negotiated with. It’s going to get worse, so much worse.”

Nile huffed. “Why are you here? Helping us escape?”

“I told you!” The woman took a brave step forward, reaching for the bars, and Booker and Nile reacted defensively, though she was still locked inside the cell. “I see it now. Quỳnh’s rage. I thought this was justice, but I’m not so sure anymore. I love Quỳnh, and I wanted to help her, but…”

“The others?” Booker asked.

Tora looked at him, her expression a mixture of sadness, disappointment, disgust. “They still believe in her.”

“What’s going to happen to you when they find out?” Nile asked. “What’s in it for you?”

The other woman paused, as if she hadn’t considered this. “I… I’ll probably be cast out,” she said softly, her body language turning inwards.

Nile hissed a breath. Booker had stiffened beside her, just enough for her to feel it.

“But it doesn’t matter. We need to leave,” Tora said. “Kiran will be back any minute.”

“’We’?” Booker snorted.

“I have to show you the way out. It’s a maze on purpose. Once you’re out, go wherever the fuck you want, you can have the van. But I need… I need to get you out.”

Nile looked at her other side, down at Nicky and Joe. She wished now, more than any time before this, that she had a language that she shared with them, something ancient and spellbinding that Tora wouldn’t understand, the way Andy and Joe and Nicky had the old Maghrebi _darja_ of Arabic, or the Genovese _dialetto_ of Ligurian. She would throw herself into languages studies after this, she promised herself. If there was anything good that could come of this terrible experience, it would be her vigor at being able to speak to her brothers in private conference.

“What do we do?” she asked them as the two finally stood again, weakened by these revelations.

“I say we kill her,” Booker said, and Tora turned sad, silent eyes to him.

“We need to get out,” Joe rasped through a voice hoarse from screaming, hoarse from keeping his despair contained, just for the moment. “If we need her to do that, then so be it.”

Nicky took a steadying breath. “Will you truly lead us to the way out?” he asked Tora.

“Yes, I swear,” she said.

He nodded once, then looked to Nile, waiting for her vote.

Nile agonized. She didn’t trust Tora, but she believed her. There was no way she had come up with those stories on her own. She hesitated, then she displayed the keys still in her palm. “We’ll let you lead us,” she declared, speaking for the group in a way Andy would be proud of. “But you aren’t coming with us when we’re out.”

“That’s okay,” Tora said softly. “I wouldn’t expect to.”

Nile unlocked the cell door and opened it, and the four of them held their collective breaths as Tora walked free again, sliding out to stand in the aisle between the two pairs a little like a child lost in a supermarket.

Then she regained some of her bravery, some of whatever vigor had led her to decide to betray her own family for theirs. “This way,” she said, going past Nicky and Joe to the white door. “Follow me."

Nicky supported Joe for the first few paces down the way, but Joe gathered himself as they got to the door, nodding silent thanks, reassuring him with a gentle push away. There would be more pain later, mortal wounds they had already received but didn’t even feel in the heat of this new battle. These would sting, burn, inflict their agonies later, but not now. Now was time for action.

Tora opened the white door and paused, listening intently, before beckoning them forward. Booker had taken the lead, following close like he would pounce the moment she laid a wrong step. Joe went next, then Nile, and Nicky took his spot at the rear, watching their backs. He craved the feeling of a gun in his hand, or the weight of his longsword at his hip.

Outside the white door was long, narrow room lined with shelving and cabinetry on the right-hand side. Two more doors stood equidistant from each other and the far wall, both shut. The lights were dimmed for nighttime, and there were no sounds at all except the gentle hum of an air conditioning unit somewhere in the distance. The walls were gray-washed stone, the same as inside the cell room, ugly brutalist minimalism that set Nicky’s teeth on edge. He had seen too many bunkers, too many buildings of horror, like it.

They tip-toed in silent single-file until they got to the first door on the left. Tora put up a warning hand, flashing her fingers in a quick pulse of ‘stop!’, and they halted like they were playing a children’s playground game, frozen in their tracks. She turned, making eye contact with the group at large, before indicating the door. She put a finger to her lips, then signed ‘sleep’ in British Sign Language.

Nicky had ASL, though it was horrendously out of date and practice, but the sign was similar to its BSL counterpart and intuitive enough for the rest of them to understand. Nicky watched as Joe and Booker made eye contact, having a silent discussion, before they nodded at the same time and headed side-by-side for the door.

Tora flapped her hand frantically at them, but Booker held the doorknob in a tight fist as he turned it and pushed the door with his shoulder without releasing the knob, opening it as quietly as possible.

Inside was a sort of rec room, two cream-colored couches perpendicular to the doorway in which they stood. There was a TV centered between the sofas against the far wall, and a folding table and chairs like the ones seen in soulless corporate break rooms stood in the corner. Another closed door stood in the opposite far corner, possibly a closet.

On the couches, Handan and Oscar, the shorter, younger man, were stretched out long, deeply asleep. The TV gave off the only light in the room; it was turned to a news channel with Cyrillic scrolling by on the ticker at the bottom. It was muted, flashing only its colors on the scene.

Nicky reached for the back of Joe’s sweater, tugging the pinchful he managed to grab. He forced his husband to look back, shaking his head, his eyebrows low in a stern show of authority. _Safety now. Revenge later._

Joe glared, baring his teeth a bit in a snarl. He wanted to kill. He wanted to hurt.

Nicky pulled him backwards by the sweater, putting his other hand around the back of his neck as Joe turned back towards him, as Joe always turned towards him. “I know,” Nicky whispered, wrapping Joe in an embrace and breathing the words into his ear only a hair’s breadth above sound. “Later. I promise.”

Nile was soothing Booker in a similar fashion, her hand out on his free one. She was shaking her head, forcing him to meet her eyes. Behind them, Tora was a ball of anxiety, swaying back on forth on each foot like she wanted to run.

The silent argument was won. Joe and Booker grimaced but let the door close again, the latch making the tiniest noise as it hitched shut, and Tora practically wiped her forehead as she nodded in relief and continued to lead them. The second door out of this narrow room was their destination, but as they approached it, still creeping on light toes and bated breaths, Nicky noticed a wooden display rack with four pistols perched upright on the countertop to their right. He reached for them, bumping Nile’s back, who also looked, and he saw a wave of relief on her face in the dim light. The others armed themselves as well, daring Tora to disagree; at the head of the line she did nothing except watch before shrugging one shoulder. Then she opened this newest door.

Inside was another narrow room, more of a passage, with a line of two communal showerheads and, beside that, a tied-back curtain hiding a nook with toilet and a urinal. As they passed, they saw an archway with another tied-back curtain, and each of them glanced through it as they walked, following Tora’s lead. Through the archway was a deeper room, with no lights on at all inside.

“Bunks,” Tora whispered. “Uncomfortable as hell.”

There had not yet been any windows in any of the rooms they had passed. Nicky was jittery, feeling more and more like he was trapped underground. He was not exactly claustrophobic, but he definitely missed the sight of the open sky above him right about now.

Tora opened the latest door and brought them into the canteen, a combination mess hall and kitchen, with a refrigerator and kitchen cabinets arranged along the wall, a deep stainless steel sink piled with plates and glasses from their captors’ most recent meal. There was a wooden dining table with stools arranged opposite, and a tall, wide open-face pantry shelf was stacked with canned and boxed goods down at the other end.

The most interesting sight was the other table, however. This one was deep, pushed up against the shorter wall closest to the door, full to the brim with sterile, plastic laboratory equipment, glassware, and machines. He recognized a few of them from his various medical degrees, like the centrifuge that stood with its chunky lid open.

The four of them stared at this table for a moment, probably all having the same thought: was there enough time, enough value, in smashing everything on this table? This was where the various drugs they had all suffered had been made, where Handan had pickled her poisons.

Tora reached her hand out, not touching but her meaning clear. Don’t consider it. Don’t torture yourself with it. Just go.

They went. There was one last, final door standing catty-corner to the pantry shelf, but Tora did not go for it. Instead, she skirted the dining table and pulled at a tiny, hidden notch in a stretch of otherwise-plain wall, swinging it open to reveal the passageway the secret door was hiding. There were stairs leading up, and Nicky’s heart fluttered with relief.

Tora went first, holding her finger to her lips again as she waved her hand at their feet. The stairs were treacherous, perhaps creaky, perhaps unstable. Watch their steps.

Nicky let the others go, standing in the mess hall with his ears straining for any sounds coming from any of the rooms they had successfully snuck through. There was nothing.

He was halfway up the stairs, close behind Nile in front of him, when Tora must have swung open a horizontal hatch. They had definitely been underground, then, a bunker buried in the earth. Very pale pre-dawn light trickled in on the tops of their heads, and he heard a collective, sighing breath release from those in front, those who were already touching the sky and their freedom.

Booker was out first, climbing and disappearing past the open square of the hatch.

There was a shout, and gunshots.

Joe roared, the pistol he had stolen held in front of him, and he charged up too, Nile close behind, Nicky close again still, and there was a flurry of movement as he stepped, blinking, into the chilly air of the outside, smelling sweetgrass and wet earth—

His vision cleared just in time to see Booker laid out on his belly in the dirt, the immortal man named Kiran standing over him. A metal baseball bat was in his hands, and Booker’s skull was caved in on one side, a one-hit death, and Nicky raised his pistol and fired, the gun jumping satisfactorily in his hands, but nothing happened as Kiran came forward, grim-faced, raising the weapon in a perfect batter’s stance, swinging out with all the power of a home run behind it, and Nicky had flinched his shoulder and arm up, but it did not protect his head from receiving the shocking, dizzying blow, and he did not feel himself fall, and he couldn’t feel his arms and legs, but he wasn’t dead when he landed, not quite, leaving him enough draining consciousness to see Tora, stepping close and laughing, before he succumbed.

Nile was the only one of them who had not died during that tiny grasp of freedom. Booker was gone first, the baseball bat cracking against his skull from behind as Kiran stood in wait. He hadn’t even seen it coming.

Joe had been grappled from the other side as he turned towards Kiran, a perfect maneuver, his attention going to the threat they could see, the threat they knew they should have been expecting, because how many times had Tora said he was due back any minute now? They should have told her to go out first and clear it with a full three hundred and sixty turn on the spot, but then that wouldn’t have helped them anyway, because it had all been a cruel trick, Tora’s vicious, merciless laughter ringing in Nile’s ears. Handan and Oscar, who had also been crouched behind the opening of the escape hatch, jumped on Joe and Nile respectively as they came out, holding mean chokes around their necks, and Handan had held a handkerchief to Joe’s mouth, while Oscar had gone for pure hand-to-hand, and Nile saw, even in these instantaneous snapshots, how their personalities came out, how each one handled their work a little differently.

Joe had drooped too quickly in Handan’s arms, his lips blue when her hand and the handkerchief came away. Oscar had choked Nile to the point of unconsciousness, but he was sloppy, and she was gasping back awake in moments, so he kicked her a couple of times in the belly until she was curled and mewling.

“I don’t have zip-ties on me, so don’t make me kill you,” he said down to her. “Handan, come use the stuff.”

She had, and Nile had felt her eyes roll back in her skull as she was lifted, cradled with an arm against her back like the Pietà as the same handkerchief was pressed tight to her nose and lips, but even this wasn’t enough to kill her, just throw her into shadows. She wasn’t aware of being brought back through the bunker, but she felt when she landed on the cold, hard floor of the cell, groaning as the impact rattled her teeth.

“Your faces,” Tora chuckled, and Nile rolled to sit up, moving slow. The chemical on the handkerchief had smelled sharp, like industrial cleaner, and it left a strange soreness in her muscles.

“Did Quỳnh teach you to be cruel, or did you come up with it together?” Nile asked, bringing her legs underneath her. Booker was lying twisted beside her, his skull inflating with disgusting cracks of bone, and she put her palm on his thigh, tethering herself to him.

“The world is cruel, little thing,” the woman said, standing beside Handan on the other side of the bars.

“Go fuck yourself,” Nile sighed. “Leave us alone.”

“No, you’re right,” Handan said. “It is a shame you two had to be tied up in this. No one should suffer for the sins of their fathers.”

Booker was awake now, but distant, gathering himself up from the shock. Nile was of the opinion that deaths that came without even seeing them coming were harder, and the brain was one of the worst organs still. Synaptic connections and electrical signals had to be rebuilt, pooling blood and brain tissue had to be drained and repaired, and even with all the work that went into it, sometimes you came out having lost something, be it ten seconds or ten minutes. Nicky had once woken from a shotgun shell to the head speaking Genovese Ligurian for at least five painful minutes, impotent to the point of tearful frustration when he kept reaching for English, _knowing_ it was there, unable to hold onto it.

“Was any of it true?” Nile asked, glaring.

“All of it,” Tora said, her face open and honest. “Even the part about getting you out. Oh, well, not what I said about losing faith in Quỳnh. That was a lie. But everything else…”

“Quỳnh escaping in 16-something?”

“1676,” Handan said, her dark eyes narrowing dangerously. “Yes, that is true.”

Nile shook her head. There would come a time, very soon, when Andy would hear this too, and it would destroy her. As it had destroyed Quỳnh.

“We won’t speak for her. She has her own story to tell.” Handan moved her gaze back to the two cells holding Joe and Nicky. Her own personal hate was reserved for them, and Nile could see how she had joined the pledge of revenge, how she had closed off her sense of morals to take part in this repeated torment of body and soul on complete strangers.

“Should we do it now or later?” Tora asked her comrade, standing contrapposto, exceedingly casual. She was pleased with herself, and Nile hated her the most at that moment, even more than Handan with her drugs, more than Quỳnh with her plans.

“Later. Let’s give them some time.”

They left through the same white door, and the lights stayed on. Nile had seen the briefest, most agonizing glimpse of the outside world at the top of that hatch, and she knew it was dawn of the second day of their captivity. Five days, for poor Booker, who was sitting up beside her, wiping his face. He stank of sweat now, but she didn’t move away.

He muttered a string of foul language, and Nile shivered, more from fear than from cold.

“They’ve got more planned,” she mumbled.

“We’ll get out. Hey. _Hey_.”

She looked dully over at him. He put a hand against her cheek.

“You can’t give up. That’s what they want. You have to stay strong. Promise?”

“Promise,” she muttered, trying to mean it.

He came forward with a kiss on her forehead, the first time he had ever done that, and she closed her eyes as she slouched against him. _I promise, I promise, I promise_ , she thought to herself, and meant it a little more each time.


	5. Chapter 5

Children shrieked in laughing play further up the beach, and Joe reclined on the chair, the sun warm on his chest. Nicky and Nile were in the water, and he heard his name being called.

“Come join us!” Nile called, waving an arm above her head. The two were in the waist-high surf, their skin sparkling with water droplets, and their smiles shone even brighter than that. Joe had to shade his eyes with a hand as he curled upwards, bracing himself on the lounge chair.

“I can’t take her alone!” smiled Nicky, also beckoning. Nile gave him a playful shove, and Joe rose immediately to defend his love’s honor, laughing. He jogged to the water, splashing into the foamy surf, and he felt Nile shriek with her own delight, just like the children and families around them, as he wrapped his arms around her middle in a rugby-tackle.

Nicky was right behind, his arms going around Joe’s shoulders, and Joe hollered, “Betrayal!” as he was dragged down, his head plunging into the sun-warm water.

As he came back up everything was wrong. The sky overhead was dark and gravid with storm clouds, and the children were screaming now with fear and pain. Joe turned on one foot in the water that was now churning, trying to keep his footing beneath him. “Nicky! Nile!” he called, searching for them, but they had not come up from the depths with him.

He called again, his voice going raw with panic, and thunder broke in the sky above his head, a rolling crack that built and built. “Nile! Nicky!” He turned again, trying to climb out of the ocean back to the sand, but something was slogging around his ankles, keeping him in, and then he was sinking too, the water slowly rising to his chest and then his neck and then around his mouth, and he raised his chin to stay above the water, screaming Nicky’s name, and then he was under, still screaming, and the water was going into his mouth, down his throat, and he thrashed, choking, screaming, screaming, screaming—

His arms and legs were sore when he woke abruptly, as if he’d been beating them against the ground where he laid, and he went over to his hands and knees to cough and gasp, his head hanging like a dog. Then he looked up, across the aisle, where Nicky had been sleeping and was now stirring at Joe’s distress, always alert, always watching and listening, like an old hound resting on a country porch.

Nicky was reaching for the bars of his cell, his eyes bruised with exhaustion, and Joe stifled his whimpers when he saw how badly his other half was faring from this ordeal. This one was worse, much worse, than what had come before.

“Are you all right?” Nicky asked softly, trying not to wake Booker and Nile beside him, speaking with the same tender nursing as if they had been lying in bed, only inches from each other, instead of separated by space and grief.

“Fine,” Joe said, shaking his head, kneel-crawling to the bars to reach for him. Nicky reciprocated, the first time the two of them had been strong enough to do it since being brought here, and their fingertips brushed before they had to pull back.

“Tell me what it was.”

Joe licked his lips. He thought he could still taste the seawater. “You and Nile, drowning. Then me as well.”

Nicky nodded minutely, a better listener than any of the rest of them, but it was easier for Joe to do this, to flay open his chest and bare his beating heart to the man who owned it, when they were in quiet contemplation together, where Joe could reach for and receive the reassuring touch he wanted after the hurt had been seen. He couldn’t, wouldn’t, go into more detail. He didn’t dwell on the symbolism, either, but he did detest the lingering aftereffects, the tight squeeze around his throat like the depths were still pushing in. He had drowned a few times over the centuries – by now, none of them had accurate counts of the manner and means of all their experiences of death, save Booker who knew that one single death by hanging had been enough – and he knew that the sensations were always there, stored in the deepest recesses of his subconscious, able to be brought forth by his dreaming, fevered mind when they were least expected, or welcomed.

The white door opened, and Joe’s head snapped around to face it. The tall desi immortal, Kiran, the one who had caved through Booker and Nicky’s skulls, was entering, holding a serving tray with microwave meals and more water bottles teetering on top. He stopped in front of Nicky’s cell to deposit the food, balancing the tray with one hand, bending athletically to slide the flat plastic dish of the meal beneath the small gap at the bottom of the jailhouse door. Nicky glared at him, unmoving as the tray bumped into his knee where he was sitting.

“Takes a big man to hit someone from behind,” Joe sneered as the man turned to give him his meal.

Kiran didn’t react to the taunt, his eyes half-mast and mild, as if he hadn’t heard at all.

“Right, Nicky? I don’t think we’ve ever used drugs and chains in our work.”

“We’ve never needed to,” Nicky agreed softly. “We’ve never been so cowardly.”

Kiran went to Booker and Nile, who were awake and quiet after all, also sitting near their door. Joe looked at them for the first time in a few hours – they had all slept most of the morning away, recovering from the injuries and the psychological blows both – and saw from their heavy eyes and dull cheeks that they were holding up no better than himself. Poor Nile. To be born into this world and immediately have to defend her right to be in it. To be given a new family and immediately have to watch it ignite.

Joe and the others waited until their captor had left the room before trying the food, reaching for the cooling plastic trays with soggy meatloaf and tasteless mashed potatoes, eating with the flat plastic forks taped to the lids. Their trash from the previous day’s meal had already been cleaned up at some point, so one by one, as they finished, they skittered the empty trays beneath the gap of the cell back into the aisle, where they would be the problem of the other immortals.

Joe leaned up on the bars, his back against the corner of the middle wall that he’d claimed, gazing softly at Nicky across from him. Nicky reciprocated, his hand stuck out from his cell. Nile had reached for it on her side of their wall, her forehead pressed to the bars with her eyes closed. She was scared. None of them blamed her.

“What did Quỳnh say?” Joe asked to the room at large, though of course he was really asking Booker to repeat his story. He wanted to go over it again. He wanted to understand.

“She asked me where you guys were.” Booker was hidden from him by the angle, sitting deeper against the wall on Nile’s other side, so Joe had only his voice to follow.

“How did she find you?”

“The dreams. I’d been ignoring them for so long, I didn’t realize I was seeing new things, flashes of the real world in between the drowning. She was letting me in just enough that she could get something from me.”

“I didn’t see anything new until that night I left for you,” Nile murmured.

“She was keeping you out. Like she had been doing for me since 1812.”

“How?” Nicky asked.

Booker sighed. “She didn’t tell me the mechanics of it, but she insinuated. She learned after that first night of me… after the very first time she knew there was a new one. She could block the… the _magic_ , or whatever the fuck it is, the psychic link, the god-knows-what, she could block it by having nightmares. If she forced herself to have nightmares of drowning every single night, she wouldn’t get anything from me, and she wouldn’t give out anything, either.”

“Every night…” Joe whispered.

“Yeah.” Booker’s voice was miserable. “She hated the thought of me, and of seeing you guys around me, so much that she thought that was better.”

“We could have found her.” Joe shook his head, devastated by the hurt she was feeling, frustrated by her inability to see anything past it. Quỳnh had always held grudges towards enemies and protected victims, even at cost to herself, whereas at least Andy quickly resolved any transgressions with negotiation or her axe. Sometimes both. It was why the two of them had made such a good team. Quỳnh, like Joe, was the deeply empathetic heart, complementing her partner’s role as the practical head. How could she have not known how important it would have been for Andy, and for Joe and Nicky, to find her again?

And it was answered for him as soon as he asked it: Andy considered Quỳnh’s loss to be her fault. Obviously Quỳnh agreed.

“She didn’t want to be found.”

Joe looked at Nile for a long beat after she had spoken.

“That first night,” she continued, her unhappy weariness palpable, as visceral as the shaken fear she had expressed during that first night of which she spoke. “She wasn’t expecting me. She let a little bit of herself go, just enough. I told you what I felt then. Crazy, furious rage. The kind wars are fought over.”

The door to their cell room opened. Handan came in first, then Oscar, and Joe expected Quỳnh this time, finally, to see her for the first time in almost five hundred years, but she was still not there. Only two of the four immortals who she had recruited and brainwashed, who she led with the same ferocity and care-giving as Andy did with them, were doing her work this time. Joe could see their loyalty and devotion. They loved Quỳnh the way he and the others loved Andy. That wasn’t a coincidence. Quỳnh had made her own golden army, her own band of warriors, but they were painted with the crimson-red poison of revenge, treachery, and cruelty instead, and Joe was sorrowful for them as well. Imagine living an immortal life driven only by hatred and violence.

He looked across the aisle at Nicky, holding his love’s gaze, and knew he was thinking the same thing. It wasn’t fair that Quỳnh had corrupted them. It wasn’t fair that whatever power that had connected their group had not done the same for these outcasts.

But, he reminded himself, as Handan unlocked the door to Nicky’s cell, sometimes life wasn’t fair. Sometimes you stand on the righteous side, and you still lose everything.

“Anything yet?”

In response, Copley took a tense sip from his tall stainless steel travel mug, the one she had seen follow him through the rooms and activities of his home like it was attached to his palm. “Not yet,” he replied after swallowing, answering the same question with the same answer, as he had done for all the previous times she had asked it. His eyes never left the computer screen, though, for which she was grateful. Even if no progress was being made, he kept up the façade of it at least, to reassure her that he had not given up.

She hadn’t either, but she was getting close. No further messages from whoever had them meant that they were not looking for ransom or demands. These were not kidnappers with an agenda or a goal; they just wanted Andy and her family to suffer.

Against Copley’s advice, she had texted back the number which sent the audio file of Nicky and Joe’s torture, sending repeated messages asking for more information or communication. Her texts became increasingly aggressive, to the point that she was swearing aloud to the screen as her thumbs typed, and Copley did the bravest act she had yet seen him do by plucking the phone from her hands before she could hit ‘send’. He kept his eye on the black screen near his computer mouse, reassuring her every few minutes that no answer had come.

She had taken to pacing the cold, modern halls and rooms of his home, wandering past furniture and art that was cohesive, stylish, international. Even with his world-traveling exploits as CIA, he would not have had the time or income to procure all of it himself, what with the pay scale of an American federal employee. Most of it, she assumed, was his wife’s, and she admired the departed woman’s taste. There was an eclectic charm, a pattern to the pieces, interconnecting the art to the décor and vice versa. Andy couldn’t remember ever, in her entire existence, owning a home that had been as well-loved as this had been, even looking past the sterile chill of the minimalism that Andy herself usually hated. Copley and his wife had been happy here.

Now, for what felt like the thousandth time in the past twenty-four hours, she was standing beside his computer chair, gazing at the multiple monitors on his desk, trying to decipher what to her looked like meaningless gibberish. She and the rest of her family had grown with technology as it had, but that didn’t mean she had become a master over it.

Copley, however, was in his element, as comfortable staring at his computer screens as a dolphin would have been in rough seas. He worked diligently and quietly, his fingers flashing over the keys as he typed and scrolled through pages that blinked up and down in glances that seemed too brief to glean any information out of them. But he made notes, writing old-fashioned style with a ballpoint pen and a white notepad beside his mouse, scribbling in shorthand. Andy glared at it, too, but got as little out of his scratches as she had with the maps and pages he had pulled onto his screens.

“We’re losing too much time,” she said, her hand resting on the back of his chair.

“They’re out there somewhere,” he murmured. He was typing a string of code, in what she knew distantly as a computer scripting language, the only language family in which she had yet to adopt a dialect. He pressed Enter on his keyboard and ran a program, bringing up a new window with a pixelated progress bar that filled at a sluggish pace.

“Yes,” Andy agreed angrily. “Being tortured.”

He raised his eyes to her. “Forgive my callousness, but… at least they’re alive.”

Andy’s hand, just behind the roundness of his skull, closed slowly into a fist.

“We’ll find them as fast as possible,” he continued, possibly seeing the flames of hellfire that had sprung into her gaze. “And we know they’re together.”

“That makes it worse,” she muttered, looking away. Joe and Nicky having to endure torture on themselves was one thing, but having to watch it in the other… she couldn’t forget the rawness to Joe’s voice as he pleaded with Nicky to hear him, to know that he would be okay, as Nicky wailed in pain. She couldn’t imagine being in the same room with that kind of grief. Her skin prickled just remembering it.

“It’s late,” Copley said after a moment. “This is going to take some time. You should get some rest.” He had quickly made up one of the guest rooms for her before she’d arrived the afternoon before, after she’d hired a very expensive chartered plane to fly her directly to the tiny Fairoaks airport that was nearest to his property. He had a car waiting for her there, a luxury she had not been expecting, and she had spent the previous night tossing and turning in sheets that were too silken, in a room that was heated and soundproofed and altogether too manufactured. Her family would laugh to know it, but her millennia of sleeping rough, in fields, under stars, against stone, had toughened her skin to the point that modern mattresses were too soft.

“I should be here in case they contact us,” she said.

“I have the phone hooked up to my system,” he replied, gesturing to the shiny black face of the smartphone, where it rested on the desk with a cable running from its bottom edge to the computer tower beneath. “If they send something, I’ll be alerted, and I’ll wake you before anything else. You look exhausted.” This he offered with the matter-of-fact honesty she had come to expect from him, as if he wasn’t afraid of her bark nor her bite.

She could feel it, from the greying bags beneath her eyes to the way her legs trembled as she shifted her weight standing behind his chair. She had felt tiredness thousands, millions, of times before this, but the fragile, heavy weariness of existing was so unfamiliar to her it was practically new; the last time she had felt this same kind of mortal fatigue was during the Bronze Age.

After a lengthy pause, in which the two bore down on each other in an impressively equal match of obstinacy, Andy nodded her head in quiet defeat. “Wake me if anything changes.”

“Instantly.”

Five steps from his desk, she heard the _brrt-brrt_ vibration of the phone flat against the desktop, and she was back at her place beside his chair in the next breath, her energy dialed up full throttle. She was reaching for the phone as she lunged back, but he already had it in his hand, his thumb opening the notification on the home screen.

It was a photograph this time, a cell-phone-quality snapshot of a newly-fired clay tablet. Unblemished by the hardships of age and weather, it was certainly recent, possibly days or hours old. The scribe had wielded the stylus with a practiced hand, pressing the divots into the clay as quickly as modern schoolchildren swirled their way through cursive, though the cuneiform on it was so ancient even Copley would struggle to decipher it.

But Andy could read it. She felt a thrill, a chill, a sorrow, an ache, and the world gave way beneath her soul as the sudden understanding of it all hit her as painfully as any death she had ever endured. She leaned forward, taking in the miniscule logograms, trying not to give away her comprehension as she made her way through the message that was certainly only meant for her.

“What does it say?”

“I can’t read it all,” she said, lying so quickly that it made her head rush. “It’s another threat.”

“What language is it, Sumerian?”

“Yes,” she said, though it was Akkadian, a cousin so distant the tracking of it would throw Copley off for weeks. “It’s more bullshit.”

“What do they want?”

“To hurt us,” she said, not needing to fake the pain in her voice.

“Who are they?”

“Someone who knows.”

“Who else knows about you?”

If she had been a few millennia younger, she would have broken then, dropping to the floor to wail through her pain. She locked her knees, bit the inside of her cheek, and read the message again, in a show of attempting once more to gain the answers she already had, answers she wished so desperately hadn’t come. The aftermath of this heel-face turn from moments ago, when she had been pleading the universe to give her this knowledge it had suddenly bestowed, was overpowering in its devastation. This was what dying of a broken heart felt like.

“Is there something you’re not telling me?”

She raised her gaze to him, a flicker of tenderness alighting in her belly. It was nice to have an ally like this. A few had presented themselves to their family over the centuries, kind, old souls who, one way or another, had assisted their cause, their own insignificant places in history recorded in memory only. Some had known their secrets, some had not, and each had taken their knowledge to their graves. As Copley would.

“It’s cruel,” she said eventually, allowing as much as she could. “It’s saying they’re in pain.”

“Who is it, Andromache? This kind of… this cruelty comes from someone who _knows_ you, and I don’t mean like I do.”

 _There was another_ , she almost sobbed. _We failed her, and lost her, and she’s risen from the grave I left her in, and she will hurt Joe and Nicky to the point of the same insanity if I don’t go immediately and surrender myself, and there’s no telling what she will do once she has us, and what if there’s no coming back from it, what if I have to go through the same kind of pain of watching her fracturing as they had to, and I don’t know if I can do it, I don’t know if I’m strong enough._

But all she said was, “I don’t know.”

“Booker?”

“Don’t be stupid,” she snapped.

He closed his lips, going back to the message himself. “I can run a program to translate it, but it will take as long as the tracker I’ve got going.”

She stifled the bitter laugh of knowing it would never work, now that she’d set him on the path to translating the wrong language, but it wouldn’t matter; she wouldn’t be there to witness his frustration when one of his endless computer tricks failed.

Some hours later, the house was even more quiet and cold than it had been. They had retreated to their own bedrooms at the same time, with Copley wishing her a good night’s rest so kindly that she almost told him what he was trying so hard to figure out, all for her benefit. She resisted, though; the bigger kindness was to leave him out of the rest of it.

She left by one of the side doors, her phone and her bag clutched in her hands. He had security systems on the house that she had learned to bypass within hours of arriving, after she had stomped into the yard during one fit of frustration and set off a blasting alarm. He had keyed in the code to turn it off, and she had memorized it without even trying. Now, as she slipped from the house, she hoped someday there would be a moment when she could explain enough of it that he would no longer grieve over his own failure.

 _I’m coming_ , she texted in Vietnamese as she got to the main road, where a car service was waiting, idling in the chilly midnight shadows. _Alone._

She had switched the phone’s language as soon as she’d retrieved it during her flight – that much she was capable of. She also toggled the GPS signal off, not wanting her CIA ally to track her like he had in the village.

It was several long minutes before the phone buzzed again with an answer. It named a tiny airstrip in central Belarus, she discovered after Googling. _There will be a car waiting_ , came a second message.

It was the first ‘spoken’ words between them during this ordeal. Andy’s thumbs hovered over the screen. There were many things she wanted to type next. Questions. Pleads for news of their brothers. Furious besmirching of her actions.

Eventually, with the silent driver up front bringing her to the airport for the flight to what was likely her doom, she typed nothing at all. There would be time for it later. There was always time.

Money was the great decider that turned the world nowadays. She remembered a time when it hadn’t been, when it was physical strength that had defined the way of kings and countries, or the shrewd decision-making of battlefields and relationships. She had excelled in both, had dominated and conquered the art of both, and currency had been no different. Like with most technologies and innovations, being there at the start of it had both pros and cons, and Andromache the Scythian worked hard to tip the scales thoroughly in her favor.

It was money, therefore, that talked that early morning at the airport, launching the small single-engine before dawn had broken, and money that fueled the aircraft and bought the pilot’s surly silence as the rising sun flooded the cockpit. They stopped to refuel twice, once in Hamburg, once in Gdańsk, and Andy also bought the pilot a rest-stop meal and coffee, to tide over his grumpiness that was getting on her nerves almost to the point of murder. When they landed at the tiny airstrip, among a pine forest so remote the pilot had begun to scowl again at the obvious crookedness of the procedure, Andy had flashed more money to get him back home safely to jolly old England, and to never mention this irritating morning again.

A black sedan was waiting for her at the side of the dirt airstrip just as the text had said, and when Andy stepped close to it, the small Cessna roaring to a distant rise overhead, both front doors opened.

Neither of the figures that stepped out were Quỳnh. Andy looked them over, seeing the servility of lackeys in their gait and demeanor, reading Quỳnh’s control over them as clearly as if her name had been carved into their skin.

“Where is she?” she asked, still in Vietnamese, as the tall man stepped forward, gesturing casually, as if he was overworked security personnel at a train station.

“Arms up.”

She matched his English, glaring. “I’m unarmed. Where is she?”

He patted her down, her compliance mirrored by his indifference. When he stepped back, taking her bag and holding her cell phone that she had already switched off, she stepped forward, snarling her frustration at the blonde woman, who had stayed nearer the car.

“Is she here or not?”

The rear passenger side door opened, the figure behind hidden momentarily by the thick tinting of the windows. First she saw the sheet of long black hair, long like she had always preferred to wear it, then a crimson-red peacoat, the color she had loved when it came out of the dyers and weavers who produced it.

Andy stared at her lover’s face, as familiar to her as her own, seeing nothing of the woman Quỳnh had been. She false-started, her lips moving soundlessly, before she tried again, this second time the centuries curling up her throat to echo their shared and separate histories in a single word, the name she had whispered and screamed and laughed and moaned, as she whispered and screamed and laughed and moaned now, all at once: “Quỳnh.”

She didn’t see the movement behind her until it was too late, the hand wrapping around her jaw and mouth to press a moist strip of fabric over her nose and lips, and she resisted only a little, knowing this was the beginning of the plan. Their gazes didn’t waver for a single moment even as her vision tunneled, Andy’s holding Quỳnh’s and back again, as they were each drinking in the sight of the person they loved and hated the most in the entire world.

She had never gotten used to the terrifying power of it. As the revolution of modern medicine had rolled slowly through the centuries, her family had learned, with the wariness of abused dogs, to fear what the rest of the world exalted. Anaesthetics, paralytics, and opioids give out blissful nothingness, numbing of the pain, artificial relaxation of body and spirit. None of it was ever welcome to them. They never took poppy or ether or lidocaine when they were offered, when they were injured in battle and the wounds were slow enough to heal that civilians saw and counted them as a casualty. They loathed and abhorred the chemical warfare of the Western Front, and they quietly left the front lines of the People’s Park when they saw the soldier-march of approaching police. Gas was a fear even before Merrick.

Their metabolisms, a word acquired by Nicky in the early 20th century at one of his earlier forays into a modern medical school, process well enough that true inebriation is no longer possible. They laugh at the amount of alcohol each one can drink, playing games with their sobriety. Drunkenness is nothing more than a state of mind, a silent embrace of the warmth of the ethanols, rather than an actual burning of their faculties. When they drink, they can get woozy, but they never fall.

Other things knock down, out, gone.

It happened for the first time in Kanchipuram, to Andromache and Quỳnh. Andy had heard of the plants that were crushed and smeared, had witnessed the priestesses ululating to the moon, the last of the vapors curling around their outstretched arms, but it had seemed more of a farce than anything, and besides, she heals too quickly, the pain shadowed in moments, for any of it to be necessary. Ritual and medicine both are beneath her.

She was not expecting recreation.

Quỳnh had returned to their campfire with pupils blown to the very edges of her dark irises, her tongue slurring on words like it had swollen behind her teeth. She stumbled, and Andromache had caught her, smoothing the hair from her forehead. Quỳnh didn’t reply to questions, and a line of spittle had run from her corner of her mouth across her cheek as her head hung back in Andromache’s arms. Her eyes were fixed, shining, sightless.

The next morning, she had moved slow, recovering like a true human being, shading her eyes and mumbling answers. She didn’t know what would happen. It had been offered, and she’d been polite and curious.

Andromache had gone to the tent where the drug was given, threatening death on the men who were supplying it, and left before the fumes from their pipes could overwhelm her too. She and Quỳnh avoid India for nearly three hundred years.

Once, later, it’s a mistake in Falmouth, a musketball embedded deep in Joe’s thigh. He is whisked away before the others can retrieve him from the Union line, and Nicky is nearly shot himself trying to get to him in the camp hospital. When he makes it inside, Joe is deeply, morbidly unconscious, the ether breathing mask affixed around his nose and mouth. The doctor had been rooting around the wound, searching for the musketball that had already worked itself back out. Andy would have been glad for the anaesthetic, this time, if only to spare Joe the doubled pain of the surgery and Nicky’s tear-blind fear, begging him to return, if it weren’t for the fearful knowledge this experience gave: they could be subdued, tied, helpless, just like that.

The gas in the church was sinister, stinking of the ever-evolving abilities of Man to inflict cruelty. The needles in her and Booker’s necks, cold and sleek, were just another reminder that they are not invincible; they have weaknesses that are far too easy to exploit, especially in the hands of people who know exactly what their limits are.

Even, for Andy now, when those limits have a hard line.

She woke slowly, her head lolling its weight against her shoulder. She was being carried, and she got her footing beneath her in time to stand under her own power as the two people flanking her paused to open a door before them.

Inside the room beyond were four cells, three occupied, and Andy’s heart sank when she squinted and saw Booker, and Nile, too. In her haste, she hadn’t even considered that Booker could have been captured alongside the others. The cryptic text messages hadn’t mentioned Nile, and Andy had harbored juvenile, false hope that maybe she had managed to get away from whatever force had taken the others and was lying low.

She went willingly into the second cell on the left, across from Booker and Nile, who were the only ones sharing, but she tripped over her numb feet and landed hard on her knees and shins as the door closed behind her. Nile moaned in concern, holding the bars of her cell, while Booker shouted abuse in French.

“Quỳnh,” Andy said, her last and first word around the drugging, hauling herself up. The captors left again, shutting the door behind them.

“Did you see her?” Nile asked.

“Yes. Quỳnh!”

“She’s not here, Andy.”

“Yes she is. She came with them to get me. She wouldn’t leave, not now that they have everyone. Quỳnh!”

“Andy?”

Joe’s voice, impossibly weak, coming from the unseen cell on her right.

“What happened?”

“They have a drug,” Booker reported bitterly. “It causes unimaginable pain. They’ve been giving it to Nicky and Joe.”

Andy crouched, putting her hand out between the bars. Across from her, directly across Joe, Nicky was sitting close to the bars of his own cell, dividing his attention between her and his husband.

“Are you all right, Andy?” he asked now, watching as Andy was able to put her hand out in offering to Joe, whose fingers snaked out briefly to connect with hers before retreating again.

“I’m fine. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s all right,” he replied, because he couldn’t say _It’s not your fault_ when he knew it was, and his and Joe’s too.

“Who are they?”

And her family explained all that she had missed, all that they had learned. They shared it, the tale bouncing from one to another, just another skill they had all perfected over the centuries, their competence as striking as the aptitude with which they engaged in any of their abilities.

“Does she…” started Nile at the end of it, asking it slow to balance the weight of her meaning.

“No,” Andy said, meeting her kid sister’s eyes. Quỳnh didn’t yet know that Andy was now mortal, as breakable and tenuous as an infant in a dangerous world. There would be a time to tell her.

The door to the cell room opened. All five of them looked. All five of them watched as Quỳnh stepped in, at the head of her army of soldiers, and came to a stop just before the beginning stretch of the aisle between the cells, her head slightly cocked, her hands resting on her hips. A very small, foxy smirk played at her lips, her eyes bright with excitement.

“Shall we begin?” she smiled.


End file.
